Your own page, with direct contact and no commission
A public page for each of your properties with a "Check dates" form that says whether dates are free and what they cost, and an assistant that does the same by phone and chat. The request lands in your panel and you confirm it. No commission to StaySuite, and no online payment.
Here is a number worth sitting with. Suppose your house takes thirty bookings a year through the portals, and a handful of those guests are people who have stayed before, or found you through a friend, or searched for the name of the village and landed on the portal anyway. Every one of those bookings pays a commission to a company that did very little to win it. The thinking behind the article on the sums of two direct bookings a year is that you do not need to give up the portals to fix this. You need somewhere to send the people who already know you, and that somewhere has to be easier to use than the portal they were about to open.
This is what StaySuite gives you for that, described as it actually works at the moment, including the parts that are not there.
A public page for your properties
Each account gets its own public page, served from an address of the form your-name.staysuite.pro. It shows each of your properties with the information from its sheet. Every property has a "Check dates" form: the guest enters arrival, departure and number of people, and the page says whether those nights are free according to your calendar, with the price and its breakdown (nights, cleaning and tourist tax, with the deposit separate). If they are free, the guest can send the request with a name and a phone number or an email address, with a notice that the details are used to reply, and a hidden trap field keeps robots out. If an imported portal calendar has gone more than three hours without being read properly, the page does not claim the dates are free: it says it cannot check right now. There is no chat or call button inside the property page.
The page is meant to be the place you point returning guests to, put on a card in the house, add to your listing profile and mention in your replies. It is not meant to compete with the portals' reach; it is meant to catch the people who already have your name.
How a request reaches you
A guest who wants to book with dates either fills in the form on the property page or talks to the assistant by phone or chat. The assistant asks for what you would ask for: the dates of arrival and departure, how many people, and a phone number or an email address so that someone can answer. It checks the single calendar, tells the guest whether the nights are free and what they would cost, and by phone it repeats the number back digit by digit before it saves it. Once it has those, it records a booking request that stores the price the guest was told. The word is chosen carefully. A request is not a reservation, it has no locator, and it does not occupy your calendar. The assistant is built so that it cannot create anything else: it has no tool that writes a confirmed booking, and it is told never to say the word reserved or confirmed, however hard the guest presses.
The request appears in the Bookings area of your panel, with pending ones first, and you also receive an email with a button that takes you to it. For each pending request the panel shows whether those nights are already taken, whether by another booking, a manual block, or a reservation that came in from a portal. You can accept or decline. If you try to accept a request for nights that are already occupied, the panel refuses and tells you what is in the way. Declining is always possible.
0commission per booking charged by StaySuite: you pay your plan's monthly fee and nothing on each stay
What a direct booking costs you
StaySuite charges a monthly subscription and nothing per booking. The one-property plan is €29 a month on the annual rate (pioneer price, excluding VAT; €59 at the normal rate), the plan for up to three properties is €49, and the manager plan for up to ten is €99. Compare that with your own statements from the portals. If one direct booking a year would cover the subscription for several months, the sums are worth doing; if you take very few bookings and none of them direct, they may not be, and it is better to say so now.
The payment question, plainly
StaySuite does not take payment from your guests. There is no card form, no online deposit and no payout. This is a decision as much as a gap: the assistant is told that it does not charge, does not promise discounts and does not accept cancellations, and the product has no payment flow that the guest can reach. After you accept a request, you agree the deposit and the balance with the guest in the way you already use. For many owners with a handful of houses that is how it is done anyway, with a bank transfer and a message; if you want guests to pay by card on the website, this is not that product.
What it does not do
- No online payment, no card deposit and no automatic confirmation. Every request needs you to accept it.
- It is not a booking engine. The "Check dates" form says whether the dates are free and what they would cost, but what the guest sends is a request, and you accept or decline it.
- Accepting a request changes its status. It does not create a booking with a price and a locator, and it does not block the nights in your calendar on its own. Block them, or enter the booking, so that Airbnb and Booking.com close them as well.
- It is not a real-time channel manager: portal calendars are read roughly every 20 minutes and each portal re-reads ours at its own pace. That is why, with an imported calendar unread for more than three hours, neither the website nor the assistant claims that dates are free.
- It does not rank your site in search engines for you. A website is a place to send people, not a source of traffic by itself.
Who it suits
It suits the owner who already has returning guests, friends of friends and a village name that people search for, and who is comfortable agreeing a payment by message. It suits you particularly if you answer slowly at night and know that the first reply decides the booking. It does not suit anyone who needs the guest to pay on the website the moment they choose their dates; for that you need a full booking engine, which is a different product at a different price.
To see what a guest sees, open the demo site and ask the assistant about a stay. Then look at your panel to see how the request arrives. If that is how you would want to be contacted, you will know straight away.