Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for hosts to spin up a Direct site and start taking booking. You will need an active Direct paid add-on with your Hospitable subscription in order to publish a Direct site, but you can preview the site before you commit. Read more about Direct features and pricing.
Creating a site
Click on Direct from the Hospitable left sidebar menu
Click on the +Create new button
Select Direct booking site
Enter a subdomain for your site, like tahoechalets.hospitable.rentals
You can set a custom domain later
Select which properties you would like included on your site.
Each property must be linked to a payout method
Create your site. We don't publish your site yet, that's the next section. It should take about ten seconds to generate a draft of your site.
Review your site design
You will want to customize your site before you publish, but don't worry, you can also make changes to your site at any time after publishing.
Design
Select your site on the main Direct page
Select Design in the inner sidebar menu
Select a template
Click the Preview button on any template to open a new tab with a preview of the template on different types of devices
When you find a template you like, click Select.
Update the other fields with your site logo, hero (banner) images, a title and sub-title, link to your social accounts, write your 'about us', and enter your footer information
For more information, see Managing images for Direct sites
Click Save
Property details content
Our Direct sites use the content from the property details pages of each property. You can add content manually, or if you have a connected Airbnb listing, we will import and update your content from Airbnb. Once you edit a property detail on Hospitable we stop syncing that item with Airbnb so you can have content unique to your Direct site. To edit your content:
Select Properties from the Hospitable left sidebar menu
Click on the property you wish to edit
Select the Details page in the sub-menu
Property images
Images will be displayed in the same order they appear in your property details. The first image is used as your property's feature image on the home page. You can manually sort the images in Hospitable by clicking edit in the photo section and then you can drag-and-drop your photos into the desired order. More about images.
If you select a site template that has additional image placements on the property page, you can set which images to display in each placement by adding tags on the property page.
In the example below, the Miami theme has an image placement in the Accessibility section, so you can designate which photo is displayed in this section for each property by setting the appropriate tag in the edit photo section.
Edit your property URLs
You can edit your Direct property URL slugs. The slug is the last part of the URL that uniquely identifies your property across all of your Direct sites. To edit the slug, open the property list for a Direct site and select Edit property URL from the three-dot menu icon.
Note: editing a property's slug will change that property's URL on all of your Hospitable sites; any previous links you have shared for that property will not work anymore.
Setting up a custom domain (optional)
If you already own a domain for your properties, you can publish your Hospitable direct booking sites to your domain. To do this, you will need to set up your DNS records by logging into your domain provider. (This is usually wherever you bought your site from) and find the option to edit your DNS records for the domain.
Note that if you intend to use this site with Google Vacation Rentals, you should not set a custom domain.
Setting a custom domain:
On Hospitable.com select Direct > Domain
Click Add your own domain button on the top right.
To set up a Root Domain (e.g. yourdomain.com)
Add (or update) your root @ record:
Type: A Record
Host: @
Value: 100.24.208.97
TTL: Automatic
Also add a new CNAME record:
Type: CNAME Record
Host: www
Value: cname.hospitable.rentals
TTL: Automatic
Note: you should only have one A record and one CNAME record for this domain
To setup a subdomain (e.g. something.yourdomain.com)
Add a new CNAME record:
Type: CNAME Record
Host: The subdomain you chose ("something" in the case of something.yourdomain.com)
Value: cname.hospitable.rentals
TTL: Automatic
It can take up to 24 hours for an SSL certificate to be verified for your site.
If the site isn't verified after 24 hours, and you have confirmed that your domain credentials are correct, please contact support.
Publish your site!
Once you're happy with the preview version of your site it's time to share it with the world.
In order to publish your site, you will need to activate your Direct plan, meaning we will start charging you a monthly fee for each property published to a Direct site or booking widget, starting from your next regular Hospitable subscription payment. Read more about Direct features and pricing.
On the Direct site sidebar menu, click on Publish and then confirm by clicking Publish now.
It will take several minutes for the SSL security certificate to be generated for your new URL. Until that happens you may see an "unsecure" warning on your browser.
If you are no longer using your site, you can click Unpublish to take the site offline.
Learn more about Direct booking widgets here.