Booking Engine - NEW

Hostaway decided to improve the booking engine to provide a good solution for small-medium PMs who do not have the resources to build and maintain a custom website but want to sell direct using a high-quality pre-made solution.

The new booking engine provides you with a beautiful website that is easy to design in a few minutes. You can also choose whether to accept inquiries or instant bookings (or both); promote listings and highlight amenities; sell extras during checkout; create custom pages; have more control over privacy options and improve the guest experience.

The booking engine settings has 4 tabs - design, listings, pages, and settings.

Design

In this tab, you can set up the design of the website. Settings are done on the left while previewing the design on the right.

1. Background Image/ Video - appears behind the header of the page and search bar (called “hero section”). Must be at least 1000*400 pixels for images. We support .webm and .mp4 file types up to 10Mb for videos. The file size limitation is meant to ensure that the home page loads quickly.

2. Colours - brand, middle, dark. Choosing the brand colour automatically sets the other two, using a palette of colours that work well together. You can change the other colours if you wish.

3. Fonts - Headers, text. Choosing the header font automatically sets the text font, but it can be changed if needed.

4. Rounded/square elements - affects whether elements are rounded or not.

5. The shadow behind buttons - buttons and other elements pop out of the page, appear with a shadow and as if they have some volume. Turning this off makes the elements look flat.

Preview on the right - is an almost fully-functional website. No bookings, inquiries or contact us form submissions are possible but the rest is.

Now. it's possible to set the color for text in the booking engine’s header & footer.



Listings

In this tab, you can choose which listings appear in the booking engine and create categories.

• Listing selector - Listings that are chosen here appear in the booking engine. There is a toggle for whether or not to automatically add new listings to the booking engine.
  
  
  
• Categories - Useful for promoting listings and organizing them into groups. There is no limit to the number of categories that can be created. Categories appear on the home page under the hero section. As well, you can add a label to the listing card. The labels appear on the home page and search results, also on all listings pages and the listing itself. The label colour can be chosen by you.
  
  
  
  

  Pages
  

In this tab, you can manage the pages in the booking engine. There are 8 default pages that cannot be removed (but can be hidden from the website). You can also add custom pages and choose which pages appear in the top and bottom menus. SEO keywords can be set to each page, and override the ones set in the general settings.

• Home - You can set the header and subtitle, which appear in the hero section. You can also choose whether to include the location filter and up to 5 amenities in the search bar. The body header, text and image refer to the frame that appears under the categories.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• All listings - Allows setting up the order in which listings appear in the booking engine. This also affects the search results and can be used to promote listings.
  
• About us - Here you can set the header, background image, body text and image.
• Privacy policy - Allows to set the header and body text. Can be opened in a new window.
• Terms & conditions - Allows setting the title, subtitle and body text. Can be opened in a new window.
• Contact us - You can set the title, subtitle, image and body text. The contact information and social media links set here appear on the contact us page as well as in the footer throughout the website. You can add an optional contact form and choose to which email address it will be sent.
  
  it is now possible to set which contact information details appear in the booking engine’s footer. This is done from the booking engine settings > pages > contact us > Select the check box which needs to be display in the booking engine

• Reservation confirmation - The page that appears when a booking has been successful. Allows setting the title, subtitle, body text and image.
• The inquiry received - The page that appears when an inquiry has been successful. Allows setting the title, subtitle, body text and image.
• Custom pages - Include images and text. Can be opened in a new tab or in the existing one. Custom pages can also refer to external URLs, like your main website. In that case, they are used as links in the menu.

• Menu customization - Up to 5 pages can be added to each menu - one at the header and one in the footer.

Settings

In this tab, you can set up some more general settings for the booking engine.

Basic settings:

• Favicon - allows setting the small icon in the browser tab
• Logo - appears on the left side of the header on all pages
• Show map in search results - whether or not to display the map in the search results and all listings page. Turning this off will still display the listing located in the listing page
• Show exact listing located in the map - when off, shows only the approximate location of a listing
• Show opt-in for promotional emails in checkout - when on, adds a checkbox to the checkout page where guests can opt-in to receive promotional email. When ticked, we update the preference in the guest book.

• Allow inquiries - whether guests are allowed to submit inquiries. Turning this off removes the “send inquiry” button from the listing page
• Allow instant booking - whether guests are allowed to book instantly. Turning this off removes the “book now” button from the listing page
• Hide credit card information section from checkout - when ON, the checkout page will not have a payment information section and the listing can be booked without payment information
• Amenities order - affects the order in which amenities appear in the listing cards and listing page. Can be used to highlight certain amenities. The top 10 amenities appear in the search results filters popup.

Advanced settings

•  Custom domain - allows you to display the booking engine on your own domain
  
  
  
• Scripts - allows entering custom codes to the booking engine
  
  
  
  
• Analytics - for Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel IDs
  • Facebook Pixel: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/952192354843755?id=1205376682832142
• SEO - keywords for the website. These are overridden by SEO settings in individual pages.

Embeddable Search Bar 

Edit and paste this code into your website to embed a search bar that sends guests directly to your booking engine. For instructions on how to use it, click here

For more information Click Here

Search results

• The search results page includes a filter bar at the top where search parameters can be changed.
• There is also a filter option for refining the search using the number of beds, bedrooms, bathrooms or one of the top 10 amenities as defined in settings.
• Listing cards display some basic information on the listing, including the lowest price that is available on the chosen dates. If no dates are chosen, the listing base price is shown.
• The map (if visible) shows location markers for the listings which can be clicked on to get to the listing page.

Listing page

• The listing page displays a gallery of the listing images at the top
• The listing description, amenities house rules, cancellation policy and availability calendar shown on the left
• On the right, there is a booking widget that allows selecting dates and number of guests and proceed to booking/inquiry
• At the bottom there is a map with the listing’s location

Checkout

• Checkout includes the reservation and guest details on the left, including reservation date, number of guests, guest details, payment details, house rules, cancellation policy and an optional message to the host
• Under the reservation details, there is a frame with the listing’s optional direct channel fees. When selected, they are added to the reservation amount
• On the right there is a price breakdown and an optional field for a discount code

Google Translate

Here is the new code if you wish to add Google Translate to your website.

<script type="text/javascript">
  function googleTranslateElementInit() {new google.translate.TranslateElement({ pageLanguage: 'en' }, 'google_translate_element')};
  var li = document.createElement("li");
  li.id = "google_translate_element";
  li.style.marginLeft ="20px";
  li.style.textAlign ="center"
  li.style.display ="flex"
  li.style.alignItems ="center"
  li.style.justifyContent="center"
  var navbar = document.getElementsByTagName("nav")[0]?.getElementsByTagName('ul')?.[0] || document.getElementsByTagName("nav")[0];
  navbar.appendChild(li);
  var script = document.createElement('script');
  script.src = "https://translate.google.com/translate_a/element.js?cb=googleTranslateElementInit";
  document.body.appendChild(script);
</script>

Share Website link on Social Media

If you wish to share your website link on social media please make sure to update the Meta Title which will appear in Search Engines and Social Media or it will be showing an error as Null when sharing

Go to Booking Engine > Settings > Basic > Meta Title > Enter a Title > Click on Save

How To Create Multiple Booking Engines Per Account - Click Here for steps