Recently, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Avery Carl on The Short Term Show. This interview was even more special because Avery and her team were kind enough to agree to a crossover episode for Booked Solid to spotlight direct booking strategies and tools that help STR hosts take control of their business.
We discussed a topic near and dear to my heart: building sustainable, long-term success through direct bookings. While we covered a lot, I want to share a few takeaways that I think will especially resonate with hosts.
Building a Direct Booking Site in 15 Minutes. Here’s How….
Summary and Highlights
Why Direct Bookings Matter (And Why They’re Hard to Start)
One of the things Avery and I both agreed on: direct bookings aren’t just about saving on fees — although that’s certainly a benefit. It’s about regaining control.
“When you build a direct booking site, an email list, and a social presence — you’re building something that compounds over time.”
But let’s be honest — the barrier to entry can feel high. I tried building my first direct booking site on WordPress, and it took me four weeks. It looked good, but it wasn’t integrated with my PMS, and it wasn’t scalable. That’s when I knew there had to be a better way.
Tips for Getting Started with Direct Bookings
Whether you’re just exploring the idea or knee-deep in building your own site, here are a few lessons I shared during the episode:
1. Start before you’re “ready.”
You don’t need to be tech-savvy. Use what your PMS gives you, collect guest emails, and build from there. Every early action compounds later.
2. Focus on mobile performance.
We found that nearly half of our traffic comes from mobile devices — but most bookings still happen on desktop. That means mobile is where first impressions are made. If your site loads slowly or doesn’t feel “native” on a phone, you’re leaking trust.
3. Use your past guests to power future stays.
I shared our 12-month nurture sequence we built inside Klaviyo. It took a couple of days to set up, but now it’s automated — sending tips, travel content, and a special offer around month 9, just in time for rebooking.
4. You don’t need to go it alone.
During the episode, we talked about the power of community. Whether it’s two or three friends or a mastermind group, having people you can bounce ideas off of can be game-changing.
What About Google Vacation Rentals?
Avery brought up a great point: one of the biggest reasons to have a direct booking site today is to get listed on Google Vacation Rentals. While it’s still early days and the traction is light, we both agree: if Google leans in the way they did with Google Flights and Hotels, it could seriously disrupt the OTA space.
Just know this: Google won’t send traffic to Airbnb. They require a true direct booking site.
Rapid Fire Questions
At the end of the episode, Avery hit me with three rapid-fire questions we ask every guest:
What advice would you give 20-year-old Gil?
Take more risks. It’s way harder when you have a family and a mortgage. Starting this company has taught me more in the last year than I ever expected — and I wish I had made a leap like this sooner.
What advice would you give a new STR investor in 2025?
Find your tribe. Don’t go it alone. Even a small circle of smart, generous hosts can help you navigate decisions faster and more confidently.
Favorite book that’s impacted your mindset?
Definitely Start With Why. Knowing your purpose makes decisions easier. For me, this business was born out of my own pain as a host. That keeps me centered every day.
Conclusion
If there’s one thing I hope listeners take away from this conversation, it’s this: direct bookings aren’t just a nice-to-have. They’re the future. But it’s not about perfection. It’s about momentum. Start small, start scrappy — just start.
If you haven’t listened to the full episode yet, I’d love for you to check it out. It’s a special one — a true collaboration between The Short Term Show and Booked Solid.
Building a Direct Booking Site in 15 Minutes. Here’s How….
If you’re looking for tools to make the leap into direct bookings faster, easier, and way more optimized — that’s exactly why we built CraftedStays.
We’re a platform built by hosts, for hosts. With PMS integrations, beautiful templates, and mobile-first performance — you can go from setup to a live site in 15 minutes. Seriously.
🗓️ Let’s talk about your property! Book a call with me today, here
Transcription
Gil: It’s not like you’re gonna be able to build out your website and you’re able to drive traffic to it and get bookings immediately. It takes time for you to build that engine there. The, the earlier that you start, the easier it gets to, to that point where you actually can drive significant amount bookings.
And I think the realistic goal is like in two to three years, you should be able to get 40, 50, 60, 65, 80% direct bookings. So the earlier you can start in that journey, the easier that you’re able to be much more independent.
Hey folks. Welcome back to Booked Solid, the podcast where we interview top operators in the short-term rental industry to share their secrets on how they’re booked solid. On today’s show, it’s gonna be a little bit different. I’m actually going to be collaborating with Avery Carl from the Short-Term Rental Shop.
Uh, I’m excited to share this episode with her because she had a chance to interview me on why I ended up starting CraftedStays in the first place. How we’re thinking about things differently, uh, in terms of direct bookings and really how to leverage the best tools possible. Um, so I had a lot of fun recording this with her.
It’s actually very interesting and nice to be on the other side of the mic, um, for a change. Um, but I wanted to kind of share this with our listeners today. So I hope you guys enjoy the show, um, and get a lot of value out of it. So let’s get us started.
Avery: How’s it going, Gil?
Gil: It’s going well. It’s going away. Going well. I’m, I’m excited about 2025.
Avery: Good.
Avery: Yeah, me too. Um, uh, one thing I forgot to ask you before we went on camera, um, you’re not in Southern California, right? You’re in Northern California?
Gil: No.
Avery: Your family safe from the fires?
Gil: Yeah, we’re safe. I have family down in South Cal, so we’re in Northern California. I’m in San Francisco.
Avery: Okay.
Gil: Um, but yeah, we’re, we’re away from all the fires, but it’s pretty horrific. And I know one of my cousins down there, it’s like surrounding them and I see all like the Instagram posts and everything about like how it is inside. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s awful.
Avery: Yeah, it looks really, really terrifying. It’s very, very sad for sure.
Avery: Yeah. Yeah. I can’t, can’t imagine. And if I, this isn’t gonna air while that’s, it’ll be, you know, gone by the time this airs, but if anybody needs any help with anything, you’re displaced, anything like that, we definitely have a large network of Airbnb owners, so reach out. And if we can do anything to help, we’re happy to do that.
But, um, okay. Let’s, let’s get into this interview. So Gil, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into being a short-term rental investor.
Gil: Yeah, so I think before I was a short-term rental investor, I was a long-term rental investor. Um, so big listener of the BiggerPockets. I think once I opened Rich Dad Poor Dad, like, it opened a whole new world to me and I started getting into long-term rentals. My day job was in tech and I oddly thought that if I buy my first property, I’ll start to offset some of my taxes that I was incurring in tech.
Um, and that was not true, and that’s why I ended up investing in short-term rentals. And ironically, I ended up really loving it. Um, I ended up loving a host. I love just the hospitality around it. Um, and all the data and all the analytics, all that I end up like really diving deep into it. All the listeners here, like, you get into short-term rentals, you think that you’re doing real estate investing, but you’re actually starting a whole new business and you’re learning all these different things on it, around it.
And some people really love it and some people don’t. And I ended up really, really loving short-term rentals. Um, mm-hmm.
So we bought in the beginning of the pandemic, my wife and I, we bought in the Smokies. Um, and then shortly after, about a year after launching our first rental, uh, we started getting a lot of anxiety that 90 something percent of our revenues were coming from one platform. It was coming from Airbnb. At that point, we weren’t getting much traction on VRBO, and I started getting a lot of anxiety that at any point, if Airbnb wanted to shut us down, we would lose all our revenues. We wouldn’t be able to pay mortgage.
Um, and that’s when I wanted to get into direct bookings. Um, we ended up building a direct booking site off of WordPress because all the big agencies were building off of WordPress. I was like, okay, if they’re building off WordPress, I should be too. And it took me over four weeks to build out our first direct booking site.
It looked really good. It wasn’t as integrated as I wanted it to be, um, but it performed really well. And then I started getting my mastermind peers asking me to build out their website. I was like, no way in hell am I ever doing that ever again.
Ironically, my day job was in e-commerce and my biggest partner was Shopify. Um, and I remember flying out to Canada and I realized that, in the e-commerce industry, if you wanted to start an e-commerce store, you can sign up for a Shopify shop and build out your store really, really easy. And that store performs really well. It converts really high, so as long as you can drive traffic towards it, you’re able to build a pretty sustainable business there.
And I realized that in our industry, in short-term rentals, you didn’t have that ability. You can use the, like, the PMSs’ website creators and oftentimes they’re pretty limited. They don’t allow you to optimize certain pages, brand aesthetics, and so on.
So I was like, there has to be something available for our industry. And I looked around, I couldn’t find anything, so I ended up coding the first version myself, shopping around with our peers, and people really loved it.
So at that point, I left my W2 job, went all in, and then hired up an engineering team and started to build a company from there. And it’s been fabulous. Now we’re integrated with five, soon to be five PMSs—so we’re OwnerRez, Hospitable, Hostaway, Guesty. And then there’s one more we’re about to launch.
Avery: Okay, well that’s, that’s exciting. So for the people who might not understand the difference between a direct booking website and CraftedStays, can you kind of give us the rundown on the differences there?
Gil: Yeah. So like, typically there’s a few ways that you could—if you wanted to go direct—there’s a few ways to do it. You can—one, if you’re on any of the big PMSs, they all have the ability to take direct bookings. You can build out a site there, um, and what they’ll do is they’ll put all your properties all on one landing page, and sometimes they’ll have search as well too.
Um, but you’re not able to talk about, you’re not able to put a blog on there. You’re not able to talk about your amenities and really style it the way you want it to. Um, so one of the biggest differences is you have a lot more control of how to create your site the way that you want it to look, um, how you want it to function.
We end up spending a whole ton of efforts on making sure that it’s mobile optimized as well too, because we find that a lot of traffic actually comes from mobile. So we worry about those small little things. And this is coming from my e-commerce side, where in e-commerce, you hyper-optimize for those small little clicks—all those interactions—and what you’re trying to do is get people to convert.
So I’m trying to bring some of those things back into our industry there. So that’s one of the biggest differences. You get some of the perks that you would get if you were to hire an agency and spend thousands and thousands of dollars for them to build out your website, but you’re able to do it on your own.
And the neat thing is that since we’re connected to all the PMSs, you can get a site set up in 15 minutes. It doesn’t take a whole lot of time because what you’re doing is you’re connecting your PMS, pulling all your property information—we sync all the pictures, all the amenities—and then you’re choosing from a variety of different templates.
And then from there you’re just customizing it to your brand, your feel, your ideal guest avatar, um, and you’re really trying to resonate with them. And you can have a really well performing site in less than a day.
Avery: And that is, that’s a big deal. So it’s more affordable and faster. I think to me, the speed is really the most important part because at least—other people might not be like this—but for me, if it’s taking me more than a few minutes to try and set something up, I will find something else to do and just never come back to that thing. So it seems like that kind of is good for people like me about this product.
Gil: Yeah, and we kind of actually built it in that way intentionally. Because what I found is that when I got into direct bookings, the barrier to entry was so high for me—both from a cost and time perspective. It was really, really costly for me to build or pay someone to build out my direct booking site, but it also cost a lot of time as well too.
Which—a lot of us—we’re spread pretty thin. We may still have our W2 jobs and we’re running our short-term rentals on the side. Time is very precious to us. So when I built this platform, I kept that in mind. I wanted to make sure that whatever I build, whatever I put out there, it converts really high, but it lowers the barrier to entry.
Because what we’ve seen is that it’s not like you’re gonna be able to build out your website and you’re able to drive traffic to it and get bookings immediately. It takes time for you to build that engine. And the earlier that you start, the easier it gets to that point where you actually can drive significant amount of bookings.
I think the realistic goal is, like, in two to three years, you should be able to get 40, 50, 60, 65, 80% direct bookings. So the earlier that you can start in that journey, the easier it is to become much more independent.
Avery: So, I have a question—I probably should have started with this question—but I just love products and platforms and learning how they work, so I just dove right into it. But for those who might not be as familiar, maybe newer listeners: what is the importance of having a direct booking presence and not just relying on Airbnb and VRBO and the other OTAs?
Gil: Yeah, there’s a variety of different reasons. I think the one that people start to gravitate towards is the fees. When you’re booking on Airbnb, VRBO, the fees can be anywhere from 13 to 18%, depending on the market—sometimes even higher than that. So you’re able to pick that back—either in your guest’s pocket or your own pocket or split the difference between the two.
But I think for me, the bigger difference is the autonomy and the ability to be independent so you’re not reliant on the platforms—Airbnb, VRBO, Booking.com—any of those to be able to sustain, to be able to pay mortgage on your properties. That to me is the more important thing.
I think the biggest difference is that when you think about Airbnb, VRBO, any of the OTAs—it’s very transactional. You’re fighting for that next booking. You’re trying to reduce your prices, you’re trying to optimize things, you’re trying to fill that calendar. Where the difference with direct bookings is that you’re actually building a sustainable business.
Anything that you build into direct bookings ends up compounding over time. So when you build out your website, you build out your email list, you build out your social—all those things, they reap benefit for the future. So over that longer period of time, it ends up becoming a marketing engine that stands on its own.
You’re not having to chase. You’re not having to discount your stays. If you have openings, you can send an email blast to all of your past guests and say, “I actually have a last-minute opening for this coming weekend.” If you’re on just the OTAs, the only thing you can really do—the only lever you really can pull—is discount that night or that next weekend.
Avery: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I’m gonna ask you some questions about marketing that in a second, but I think to me, the first thing that I thought about when you started talking about having direct booking websites is that you—you have to have one in order to take advantage of Google Vacation Rentals.
And so, we’ve yet to see if Google’s actually going to, you know, push that forward ’cause they have a habit of putting things down after a while when they start. But you do—if you want to participate in Google Vacation Rentals—have to have a direct booking site. They’re not going to drive traffic to Airbnb. You’ve gotta have a direct one. So how does that kind of play in with CraftedStays?
Gil: You’re absolutely right. Google will actually direct traffic, but they actually—they don’t prioritize the OTAs. They actually do have it in there as a clickable option. But you’re absolutely right—if you want to get on GVR (Google Vacation Rentals), you need to have a direct booking site there.
And you’re absolutely right that we’re still seeing how Google will evolve the platform. It originally started off as a project that was on the hotel side—Google Travel—and then eventually it got into Google Vacation Rentals. So a lot of the controls that the hotels have—the ability to optimize their listings—all those things aren’t even available to us. We can’t even rearrange our photos. We can’t optimize anything. So there’s no concept of SEO for Google Vacation Rentals.
I think because of that, we’re seeing very low traction for it. So I’ve seen—there’s very few hosts that I’ve come across that have done really well in Google Vacation Rentals. But I do think that over time, we’re gonna see that change as Google releases new tools and they spend more time and effort on it. Because like Google Travel—like if you ever search for a flight—that tool is used by many, many, many now. So that shift is still to come.
Avery: Yeah. I think I agree with you. I haven’t seen anybody have great success. I mean, we’ve had a booking here or there—same with, you know, any other people that I’ve heard from anecdotally—but nothing major yet. But they do have the, if they want to, the ability to completely disrupt the OTA space.
Gil: Oh, for sure. If they decide they want to. I mean, when you travel, there’s probably two things that you look for. If you mainly travel using Airbnb as your means of finding lodging or stays, you’re gonna go there. But the other place you’re gonna go is either YouTube or Google. You’re gonna find out what places to visit, what are the amenities—not amenities, but like what are the things that you should be doing in that area. And so Google is like right front and center of all of that.
Avery: Yeah, yeah. I agree with that a hundred percent. I’m interested to see what Google Vacation Rentals will do in the next few years.
Avery: Let’s talk about features a little bit. So we’ve talked about the importance of having a direct booking website and how with CraftedStays you can set one up really easily. You integrate with a lot of the big PMSs, which is really important. But let’s talk about some of the features of CraftedStays.
Gil: Yeah, I think the biggest one is just the flexibility on being able to create your site. So I think first off, we do have a template library that you can choose from, and we make sure that the template library has really beautiful templates in there that help you get started on everything.
So we fill out all the blocks for you. They’re mainly placeholders, but you’ll replace the hero images, the imagery, the copy, and all that stuff. We have places for you to upload, for instance, your logos, your images, your bio. We think the bio is actually very important, especially for hosts under 20 or so properties. I find that when we ran our test, for some of our smaller operators, really building that trust on the front page using your profile really helps on conversion.
We have our template library, and then you can completely drag things around. You can rearrange the blocks, you can add things on there. So you have the power of a Squarespace, a Wix, or a WordPress. But the major difference is that it’s tightly integrated back into your PMS. So you’re not having to add your properties in there manually—it all synchronizes.
You can choose which ones you want to highlight, you can change your base price, and so on. Everything is driven by your PMS. So all the time you spend making sure that your listing looks good on Airbnb and VRBO and Booking.com—it pulls all that information. And you can do overrides if you need to.
I think the other big feature is around both SEO and mobile. CraftedStays is a Google for Startups partner, so Google invests in us quite a bit. They’ve actually paid for a lot of our infrastructure—we’re all hosted on Google. We got a lot of trainings from them. I got a lot of insider tips on Google Vacation Rentals and some of the things they’re doing there.
But we also had them look through our web pages and make sure that their crawlers, their bots, can actually crawl our pages efficiently. So they advised us on how to optimize our templates and our pages to really suit well for search engines—specifically their own search engine.
And then on mobile, we just obsess over really making sure that our websites perform well. We find that about 46% of traffic comes from mobile. That’s a significant amount. Most of the bookings are still on desktop—about 60%—but most people will search for you, find you, discover you—first landing on your page on mobile.
So we make sure that—like one of the things that we do is, whenever we download the pictures from the PMSs—we’ll convert them four times over and make them smaller so they load really fast on mobile. And we still have a high-res image on desktop so it looks really good on a big screen, but it loads really fast on a small screen.
We did that from trial and error. When we first launched, we didn’t do that, and we found out it was hurting our search engine rankings because our sites were loading slower. The guest experience wasn’t as great. So we did a lot of optimizations to make sure it performs well on mobile.
And then we do small things—like, if you’re on mobile and you’re scrolling down the page, usually you have a Book Now button in the center. But if you’re halfway down the page, we pin the Book Now button at the top. So you’re always able to search for dates without jumping to another screen or pressing another button.
We do a lot of small tweaks to make sure that when someone’s visiting on mobile, the experience feels very natural to them and they’re not just seeing a desktop version of your site on a smaller screen.
Avery: I like that. I like that a lot. And you’re right—when I know I’m going on a trip somewhere, like I had a doctor’s appointment earlier, and you know how those go—you wait much longer than expected. So you’re scrolling, scrolling your phone, thinking what can I be doing in this time?
We’re planning a family vacation—let me find a place to stay. And I’ll look, and I’ll say, “Okay, I like a couple of these,” but I almost never—I don’t think I ever have—booked an actual stay on mobile. Hotel, Airbnb, or otherwise. So I think that’s a really interesting and good callout—you want it to work really well on mobile, but also that’s not where a lot of the actual booking is done.
Gil: Yeah. And we do some small things where, like, if you’re on the property page, there’s actually a Share button on some of the templates where you can share that specific property back to your email or text message. So then you can just pin it to yourself and open it on desktop later.
Those are the small little things we look at.
Avery: And I think it’s also really interesting—and correct me if I’m wrong here, making this assumption—that by working with Google, by Google being invested in your company and them looking through, their SEO experts telling you what needs to be done on your websites in order to be found more easily—would properties that do have websites with you guys—are they statistically or anecdotally even—found more easily than potential other direct booking websites? Just because of the way yours is optimized?
Gil: Yeah. We don’t have any stats on—like, I’m not comparing people’s Google Analytics on what they had before versus what their traffic is now. But we’ve had—like, there’s a guest that was originally on Hospitable’s direct booking engine and they moved over to us. They saw a 75% increase in conversion in just a few months.
I was blown away. I did not expect it to be that high in such a short amount of time. So we’ve seen significant increases in both traffic drivers and site conversion. I’m pretty thrilled about just where we’re heading.
And I think one of the big things I didn’t talk about—but because we built it as a platform and everybody’s using these templates—we get to optimize and run tests over time.
What we’ve done is we’ve chosen some of our larger hosts that have a significant amount of properties and we’re running small little tests with them to see if we can increase their conversions. That’s where we find like, “Oh, pinning the Book Now button to the top of the page on mobile”—things like that.
When we find something that really increases conversion, we make that sweeping change for everybody. So anyone using that template gets to benefit from those optimizations. That’s one of the biggest differences between our platform and hiring an agency to build your site.
When an agency builds your site, they build it specifically for you. If they have learnings from other clients, they’re not going back and updating your site. I haven’t seen that happen.
But for us, it’s automatic. You automatically get to benefit from that. So if clients want us to add certain blocks on there and we make optimizations—it becomes available to everybody.
Avery: Oh, that’s awesome. Okay, so—what have I not—Is there anything that I haven’t asked about that you feel like our listeners would benefit from hearing? ‘Cause at the end of the day, I’m not a tech person, so I might be missing something really cool about it that I just haven’t given you the opportunity to talk about yet?
Gil: No, I think the major thing is really—get started as early as you can. And even if you don’t use us, and you use the booking engines that come from the PMSs, get your direct booking site, start collecting those emails early on.
And once you mature—once you collect an insightful amount of emails and you feel like you want to amplify your direct bookings—you can take a look at us, you can take a look at some of the other agencies out there. But I encourage folks to just start as early as possible.
And that’s kind of why we kept our subscriptions so low. Like, it’s really inexpensive for you to start a direct booking site. We have a promotion right now—if you have two properties, it’s only $59 for the first year.
So it’s really affordable. The reason I did that is I want folks to start as early as possible. Because you’re not gonna get those bookings—you’re not gonna get 50% bookings within the first six months. That’s not necessarily feasible. There are—I’ve seen some folks do that—but it’s not the norm.
So if you can start collecting those emails, if you can start marketing to guests, start building your social presence—you’re building yourself a very sustainable future. And as people are growing their portfolio, that’s just gonna help you out in the future.