Booking Engine

The Booking Engine provides a beautiful website that is easy to design in just a few minutes. You can choose whether to accept inquiries, instant bookings, or both. The platform allows you to promote listings and highlight amenities, sell extras during checkout, create custom pages, have more control over privacy options, and enhance the guest experience.

Create one or multiple Booking Engine

To create a new Booking Engine and manage it, you can use the dropdown in the Booking Engine settings page next to the Save button as shown in the screenshot below, and click on "Add Booking Engine"

Each Booking Engine is independent and can have its settings, design, and listings, as well as custom domains. To customize the Booking Engine > Click on the dropdown > Select the Booking Engine you would like to customize.

Booking Engine sections

Design

In this tab, you can customize the website's design on the left while previewing it on the right.

Background Image/ Video - appears behind the header of the page and a search bar (called “hero section”). Must be at least 1000*400 pixels for images. We support .webm and .mp4 file types up to 10 MB for videos. The file size limitation is meant to ensure that the home page loads quickly.
Colors - brand, middle, dark. Choosing the brand color automatically sets the other two, using a palette of colors that work well together. You can change the other colors if you wish.
Fonts - Headers, text. Choosing the header font automatically sets the text font, but it can be changed if needed.
Elements
- Rounded/square - affects whether elements are rounded or not.
- 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.

On the right side, you can see a preview.

Listings

In this tab, you can select which listings appear in the Booking Engine and create categories.

Listing selector - Selected listings will be displayed 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
- On the home page, categories will not be displayed, but labels will be visible
- You can add a label to the listing card and choose the color of it
- The labels appear on the "Search" results, on the "All listings" page, on the "Home" page, and on the listing itself

Pages

Within this tab, you can manage the pages located within the Booking Engine.

8 pages are pre-set and cannot be removed but may be hidden from the website if needed. Additionally, you can create custom pages and choose which ones are displayed within the top and bottom menus. Each page can also be optimized for SEO with specific keywords, which can override 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 will be displayed in the Booking Engine. This 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
Display in Footer - You can also set which contact information details will be displayed in the Booking Engine’s footer. This should be made from the Booking Engine > Settings > Pages > Contact Us > Check the box associated with the info you would like to be displayed
Reservation confirmation - This page is displayed when a reservation is successful. This is important to provide information about reservation numbers and details that help build trust. In addition to setting the title, subtitle, body text, and image, you can add custom fields to the body text displayed on the reservation confirmation page. This allows you to personalize the message, add reservation numbers, guest portal links, and more. You can find this setting in the Booking Engine → Pages → Reservation Confirmation → Edit.
Inquiry received - This page is displayed when an inquiry has been successful. This is important to provide information about details that help build trust. In addition to setting the title, subtitle, body text, and image, you can add custom fields to the body text displayed on the reservation confirmation page. This allows you to personalize the message, add reservation numbers, guest portal links, and more. You can find this setting in the Booking Engine → Pages → Inquiry received → Edit.

image (16).png

Custom pages - Include images and text. Can be opened in a new tab or 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 could be added to each menu - one at the header and one in the footer.

Settings

In this tab, you can set up general settings for the Booking Engine.

Disclaimer

After making changes to the Booking Engine and saving or publishing them in Hostaway Dashboard, please note that it may take up to 5 seconds for the changes to fully apply.
During this brief period, if you attempt to access the Booking Engine, you might experience temporary issues
We recommend waiting a few moments before trying again to ensure that the settings are properly updated

Basic settings

Website name (SEO meta title). This will be displayed in Search Engines and Social Media or it will show an error as Null when sharing
Favicon. Allows configuration of the small icon in the browser tab
Logo. Displayed 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 on the listing page
Show listing reviews. Allows you to either show or hide reviews for a specific Booking Engine
Show the exact listing located on the map. When off, shows only the approximate listing location
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 emails. When ticked, we update the preference in the guest book
Include Fees & Discounts in the Nightly Rate. When enabled, the option incorporates applicable fees (e.g., cleaning fees) and discounts directly into the base nightly rate displayed to guests. This provides a more accurate total price upfront, including all charges, on search pages and throughout the booking flow. However, the cleaning fee may still appear separately in the price breakdown during the reservation process, as long as it's disclosed, which is compliant with legal requirements.
- Search page: The cleaning fee is included in the base price.
- Reservation page: The cleaning fee may be shown separately in the price breakdown.
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 or not to allow guests to book immediately
- Disabling this will remove the "Book Now" button from the listing page
- You can choose which listings from a particular Booking Engine are immediately bookable
- If Allow Instant Booking is enabled but the card cannot be accepted by the payment processor, you will be notified but the reservation will not be processed. This is to prevent fraud and to avoid blocking dates for an unpaid reservation
- To set this up, you should go to the Booking Engine → Settings → Basic. Check the box next to Allow instant bookings. When this is done, a new button Manage Instant Bookings Listings will appear. In the side window, you can select which listings you want to use instant booking for:
  - If no listings are selected, instant booking will be applied to all current listings, and all new listings added in the future
  - If some or all listings are selected, instant booking will apply only to the selected listings. New listings are not automatically included.

image (17).png

Enable guest checkout without credit card information. When on, the checkout page will not have a payment information section and reservations can be made without payment information. By default, this toggle is turned off
Amenities order. Affects the order in which amenities appear on the listing cards and listing page. Can be used to highlight certain amenities. The top 10 amenities appear in the search results filter popup.

Advanced settings

Custom domain. Allows you to display the Booking Engine on your domain - Read more about custom domains
Scripts. Allows entering custom codes into the Booking Engine
- Head Script. Please enter any scripts you wish to run on the website such as analytics tools or web chats. It can only include tags such as title, meta, script, style, and link.
  - The Head script can be used to prevent all search engines that support the noindex rule from indexing a page on your site. To do that, please follow the next steps:
    1. In Booking Engine > Advanced Settings > Go to Scripts > Head Script
    2. Enter the following snippet <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
    3. Save and check the site to make sure nothing broke. This will prevent a site from being indexed by search engines and crawlers
    4. For more information about this topic please check Block Search indexing with noindex
- Top Banner Script. This custom script allows you to easily add custom scripts to create a banner at the top of the Booking Engine. The banner can be used to display important information such as phone numbers, links, discounts, or any other relevant details to provide guests with a seamless and informative booking experience. See the example below "20% off all bookings with coupon code DISCOUNT20":
```
<div style="background: #f2f232;width: 100%;height: 30px;text-align: center;line-height: 30px;font-size: 14px;">
20% off all bookings with coupon code <b>DISCOUNT20</b>
</div>
```
- It could also be used for Google Translate
Analytics. For Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel
SEO. Keywords for the website. These are overridden by SEO settings on individual pages.
Widgets. Embeddable Search Bar and Calendar widgets

Some Booking Engine pages

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 the settings
- When filtering by number of beds, the filter is non-exclusive, i.e. if we enter one bed in the filter, the booking engine will show us all listings that have one bed or more, if we enter two beds, it will show us all listings that have two beds or more, and so on
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

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