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Booking Engine: Redirecting your own domain

Florian
  • Updated

How to use your own Domain for the Booking Engine?

This will require you to:

  1. Make a few settings on your Hostaway Dashboard
  2. Go to your domain provider and update some records

Please note that the Hostaway Support team is not responsible for setting up your DNS. If you need assistance in setting up your domain records, please contact your DNS provider to expedite the process.

 

Set up your own domain

  1. When setting up the Booking Engine, you will have the option of redirecting your own domain or sub-domain to your Hostaway Booking Engine.
  2. Go to Hostaway Dashboard > Booking Engine > Settings > Advanced

 

Use Hostaway’s prebuilt domain (holidayfuture.com)

  1. Turn on the switch
  2. Choose a “subdomain name” (in this case myrentals)
  3. Hostaway website will be hosted in that subdomain

Booking engine 1.png


Use your own domain

  1. Choose this option if you would like to display the Booking Engine on a main domain

  2. We will use the example for the domain myrentals.com

    • Turn ON the switch for “Use your own domain”

    • Add your domain name without the “www”. For example myrentals.com

    • Save changes

  3. Then you should go to the Domain Provider dashboard and

    • Create/edit DNS record A, with the name “@” and value “54.70.111.180” (old one) or “54.189.34.167” (new one). Copy A record from Hostaway (See image below)

    • Create/edit DNS record CNAME, with name “www” and value “proxy.holidayfuture.com” (old one) or “proxy2.holidayfuture.com” Copy CNAME from Hostaway (See image below)

    • Remove from DNS settings any AAAA records pointing to the main domain (in our example www.myrentals.com)

    • Make sure you only have one A record for the domain/subdomain in the domain DNS Zone to avoid any issues with certificate creation

booking engine 2.png


Use your own subdomain

  1. Choose this option if you would like to display the booking engine on a subdomain (for example book.myrentals.com)

  2. When choosing this option, you should

    • Enter the subdomain and domain names. For example, if you would like the Booking Engine to appear on book.myrentals.com then under the subdomain you should enter “book” and under the domain “myrentals.com”

    • Save changes

  3. Go to their Domain Provider dashboard and

booking engine 4.png

 

To activate the Recaptcha v2

  1. Go to https://www.google.com/recaptcha/about/

  2. Click on “V3 Admin Console" (Do not click on the blue button "Get Started")

  3. Fill out the custom domain (e.g myrentals.com)

  4. Choose Recaptcha v2 >

  5. Submit

  6. Enter the site key in the Hostaway dashboard

  7. Enter the secret key in the Hostaway dashboard

  8. Save the changes

  9. Wait 24 hours before the changes apply. It may take longer depending on the domain provider

 

Important

  • Changes could take up to 48 hours to be made depending on your domain provider
  • You will need to activate Captcha
  • Make sure you only have one A record for your domain, the same A record should apply automatically for the "naked" domain too (without the "www" prefix), otherwise, our system will not be able to process the SSL certificate.
  • Make sure you don't have any AAAA or ALIAS records in your domain DNS Zone file otherwise, our system will not be able to process these changes
  • Booking Engine pages that have payment links cannot be masked within a different URL, otherwise, the payment links will be greyed out for security purposes
  • The Booking Engine cannot be used inside an iframe. A payment processing page should not be hidden inside another page for security reasons. What an iframe does is hide one URL inside another, which breaks security, and therefore the Booking Engine will not have the Book Now button active if it is used inside an iframe.

 

Some tools

  • If you don't know who your domain provider is, use who.is
  • If you would like to check if your A record/CNAME is propagating properly, you can use WhatsmyDNS.net
  • Once changes have been made, you will need to check if it worked properly via Incognito Window (for Google Chrome) - Incognito Window will force your browser to check if the domain redirects properly to Hostaway Booking Engine (instead of relying on cache)

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