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Direct Booking Websites
How Stay Helps Hosts Get Direct Bookings
Learn more about Stay and its integration with Hospitable, and how you can take advantage of it to increase direct bookings.
In this episode of the Hospitable Hosts podcast, we welcome Paul Buonopane, COO at Stay, a direct-booking marketplace designed to help vacation rental hosts and property managers connect with travelers without relying solely on traditional OTA platforms. The host-centric marketplace was co-founded by Scott McGillivray, a real estate expert and television host known for his work on HGTV.
In the episode, Paul shares how Stay is different from traditional booking platforms, what it offers for travelers and property managers, and how Hospitable users can benefit from the new integration with Stay. He also discusses the importance of building a multi-channel distribution strategy, common misconceptions about direct bookings, and shares a piece of advice on how to make a vacation rental business more resilient.
Press Play now to discover what Stay is all about and how it works for STR hosts and property managers.
Do you prefer to read the highlights? We’ve got a summary of the key takeaways below.
How Stay Is Different from Traditional Booking Platforms
Paul explains that Stay is a direct booking channel for property managers and owners. “My roots in vacation rentals go way back to FlipKey, and in some ways, Stay is similar to that,” he says. “Folks now have a site and treat direct bookings as a strategic priority, and we try to help them actually get direct bookings on their website.”
The platform is designed to help property managers avoid high OTA fees to keep more revenue per booking, build direct relationships with guests, and have full control over their pricing policies and guest experience. Unlike other online booking platforms that focus on guests first, Stay is host-centric.
“We’re less of a middleman than the other OTAs, I think,” Paul points out. “We’re promoting and putting front and center our owners’ brands, and we’re not hiding them. In all of our communications, on our site and on the host page, their logos are featured alongside ours as partners. In the communications we send to travelers, we’re not promoting Stay so much as promoting the operators, the people who actually provide the experience, who own or manage the properties themselves.”
Building Trust to Ensure Demand from Travelers
Paul emphasizes that Stay builds trust by connecting travelers directly with property owners and managers, resulting in a more straightforward booking experience and allowing travelers to avoid platform fees and keep more of their travel budget.
“I think they see it as an advantage. Like, I should be booking with the operator, not a faceless marketplace. Even though I think we have a lot of good visibility with Scott and our team, at the end of the day, we’re not involved in the transaction.”
How Stay Works for Hospitable Users
Paul notes that Stay’s integration with Hospitable is “the easiest” out of the ten integrations that they have with property management systems. “I think we've done a really good job of integrating with Hospitable, but we'll find out over time. It's simple and documented, and there's a welcome video by Scott McGillivray in our documentation.”
Paul briefly describes the steps that Hospitable users need to take to connect their Hospitable account with Stay to list their properties on the marketplace and manage bookings within their existing Hospitable workflow. He says the entire process takes only a few minutes of active effort, and the properties will be live on Stay within 24 hours. The only other thing they ask you to do is to send them an email and let them know you’ve done that.
Building a Good Diversified Booking Strategy
Paul doesn’t recommend relying on one booking channel. “Even if you feel great—say it’s organic and you’re getting a lot of traffic—that can shift with a single algorithm update. If it’s Airbnb and they change their fee structure tomorrow, or they change their sort order, how much does that hurt your business?”
He underlines that diversifying your distribution strategy and accepting direct bookings is essential to building a resilient vacation rental business. Still, it all depends on how OTA-reliant your business is. “If you’re 90% plus reliant on Airbnb or Vrbo, the last thing we’d advise you to do is walk away from that,” Paul says.
“We think a good, realistic metric is to look at it as a year-over-year target. Say a property manager or owner is 90% reliant on those two sites, or similar ones. Next year, try to get to 80%; set yourself a realistic number. And for the most part, when someone is that reliant, we talk about it as a good addition to the mix. We’re a demand source. We know from years of development that we’re driving incremental, new traffic, and that we’ve got a lot less competition than those other sites.”
Common Misconceptions about Direct Bookings
Paul says that hosts often think that you just need to build the website, and the traffic will come. “But that’s kind of the starting gun. It’s definitely an ongoing effort, and I like to think about it in terms of a snowball effect. Giving up too early, after four months, what I’ve been doing isn’t working—I think that’s calling it quits too soon.”
Paul says they hear such complaints from property owners and managers. But he thinks the problem is that they don't really build up the review count, don’t collect contact information, and don’t grow email lists before they launch their direct booking website.
“They get too impatient. Over time, what you want to see is a lot of small contributions from different areas: referrals, repeat guests, email, and building up a social following, though that’s hard to do in 2026. That’s what takes time, and I think people are throwing their hands up a little too fast.”
Listen to the full episode of the Hospitable Hosts podcast to learn more about Stay and its integration with Hospitable, and how you can take advantage of it to increase direct bookings
Table of contents
How Stay Is Different from Traditional Booking Platforms
Building Trust to Ensure Demand from Travelers
How Stay Works for Hospitable Users
Building a Good Diversified Booking Strategy
Common Misconceptions about Direct Bookings