Huge feature releases this week for Direct, Owner Statements, Booking.com, and more!

Direct

We've revamped the booking flow by enabling Apple Pay for Direct Premium users 🫰

• We've implemented a solution that will make it easier for us to add more payment methods to the checkout flow
• To use Apple Pay, guests must be using a supported browser (Safari on iOS or MacOS)
• We are working on adding Google Pay as a payment method option as well, but need to finish testing

Direct Premium guest verification now happens in the guest portal, using our guest verification screens ✅

• We recently released Ad-Hoc Guest Verification that's powered by Authohost and allows guests to complete the verification in a guest portal
• Direct Premium reservations used a different method, which redirected guests to an Autohost-owned flow
• We've merged these experiences so that Direct Premium reservations will now complete their verification in the new Hospitable hosted guest portal
• These updates will make it easier for our team to quickly improve the guest verification process based on hosts' feedback

Abandoned booking reminders 💸

• We want to help hosts convert more Direct visitors to completed bookings
• There is an opportunity to do so with visitors to Direct sites abandon their booking, meaning they never finish making the reservation
• Now we'll send emails to guests who have abandoned their Direct booking, to help reclaim a percentage of those bookings that would otherwise have been lost

Owner Statements

A new and improved version of Owner Statements has landed 📈

• We now have full control and ownership of statements, which means we can move faster and easily make improvements
• Commissions and fee ownerships are now fully customizable, allowing property managers to set up any kind of agreement they have with their owners
• The statement template has been overhauled, making it easier to cross-check payout calculations
• You can now apply an Agreement (commissions plus earnings from fees) to a future date, helping property managers who are renewing and updating agreements in the future

Delete commission period 🗓️

• We can now delete individual reservation agreements per property
• It needs to be a period without a predefined end date (so the last one that was added)
• It cannot overlap with a statement that is already published
• If there is a previously active agreement, that end date will be unset and will apply indefinitely.

Metrics

Secondary users: fixed primary host switching from the Metrics navigation bar 📊

• When in Metrics, it is now possible to switch user context for secondary users

Booking.com

Introducing Booking.com's "Request to Book" support 📘

• Hospitable will fetch and display Request to Book in the app, which will be practically identical to Airbnb's inquiries
• The only major difference is hosts are not yet allowed to send replies to inquiries, but this has been added to the roadmap

Inbox

Display expected payout for inquiries in one of the sidebars 💰

• We are now displaying the expected payout for inquiries on the left-hand sidebar before they get accepted

Guest Experience

Suggest with AI now uses the host's preferred name 🤖

• If the host's preferred name is set on Airbnb, that name will be given as the host's name to the Suggest with AI prompt

API / Connect

V2 webhooks for hosts as a private pilot ✋

• Since the launch of the V2 API, we've had many requests to make the new webhook formats available for both hosts and vendors
• This has now been launched to all hosts who requested in Featurebase for a short pilot, with the aim of a full release next week
• This is the final release for us to set a date for the deprecation of our V1 API

API source for calendar data 📅

• We now show which vendor is the source for calendar updates (rather than just API)
• This is another win now PriceLabs has migrated to the V2 API
• These are not back-dated but should start populating when vendors sync calendar data again

Calendar restriction on the API 🔒

• If an Airbnb channel is considered calendar-restricted because of its scopes, we now return an error when someone tries to update that property's calendar via the API

General

Format guests' telephone numbers 📞

• We'll try to convert the number to the international format with a + and the country code based on the guest's country and given phone number
• This will make clicking them easier to take action

The time picker now rolls over in 12 hour-mode 🕰️

• For people who have 12-hour mode enabled and trying to use the time picker, the rollover from AM to PM was unclear and now it's easier to use

We are currently in-progress with upgrades to how Hospitable connects to your Airbnb accounts. If you have not yet, please review our main help center article that goes into detail on the topic.

Please also look out for emails from us. We are in the process of sending out personalized communication and instructions based on the nature of your Airbnb listings.

Improvements across the board! And did you know Hospitable is developing an in-house Upsells feature?

Direct

• For a small handful of hosts who use base font sizes that were small the date picker text was tiny. This is fixed now.
• We fixed the incorrect cancellation calculations being shown to host when initialising a cancellation.
• We've added a bit more clarity to the ad-hoc payments feature to make it abundantly clear that ad-hoc charges are not to be used for payment terms.
• Hero videos are now available to everyone!
• The About Us field now supports multiple lines.
• We fixed a bug where some Booking Request automated messages where not sending for direct booking in verification/approval scenarios.
• Little quality-of-life improvement in the MPS widget: when clicking on one of the three inputs, any other open window will now automatically close. An example before/after can be seen in the attached recordings.
• Payment Grace period extension - but now it actually works.
• Take check-in and check-out availability into account in the Booking Widget: we now check whether the check-in and check-out dates allow for check-in and check-out and will reset the booking widget to a clear state if invalid parameters are passed into it.

Upsells

• In case you missed it - Hospitable is developing a native Upsells feature that will allow your guests to purchase add-ons for their stays using Hospitable's Guest Portal. You can find more details and a short demo in one of our recent Town Halls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfedyfazW7g&t=1260s

Ad-Hoc Guest Verification

• Is now available for everyone!
• We have added a new inbox permission Purchase additional services that will allow secondary users to initiate ad hoc guest verifications

Pricing and Availability / Calendar

• You can now edit default minimum stay in availability rules.
• Small UI improvement to the days of the week ui in the calendar sidebar (visible when selecting more than 7 days to indicate which days of the week to apply changes) and to make the date selector more obvious that it is a dropdown.

Owner Statements, Metrics, and Reservation Financials

• We are now parsing Vrbo's property damage protection and extra payments correctly.
• Fixed an issue where big metrics summary numbers (congrats!) could overlap.

Smart Devices

• We were only displaying 20 codes on the lock without the pagination so there was no way for user to see other codes. Pagination is now added.
• Some users were seeing issues with their always on manual codes which couldn’t be changed through Hospitable. Should be fixed moving forward.

Integrations

• New vendor page: Hudson Creative Studio, who build custom WordPress direct booking sites.

Inbox

• Fixed an issue with images in the conversation taking up way more space than they should have been.

Guest Experience

• We added a bit of UI clarity on ‘After a new reservation’ messaging rules to specify that they will not send if the check-in time of the reservation has passed.
• Fixed a bug where a few customers were seeing "The selected host.# is invalid" errors when trying to edit custom codes.
• When doing ruleset validations we will now consider the connected channels. Previously, we’d show a message content warning for VRBO when the host doesn’t have a VRBO channel connected to their Hospitable account. This only happened if the messaging rule is scoped to “All platforms”. Should be fixed moving forward for all validations.

Operations

• Hosts who had multiple rulesets for the same event (i.e. team:checkout) might've experienced some of their messages being failed for no specific reason. That happened due to one of their rulesets, that hadn't got any teammates resolved, was canceling other rulesets' scheduled messages.
• Fixed an issue with teammate notifications being stuck in Scheduled when they were in fact Sent.

Mobile App

• Fixed a bug causing frequent, unintended log outs.
• Universal links! Folks opening Hospitable links on their mobile devices previously opened in their web browser, even if they had the app installed. iOS will now ask them if they want to open it in the app.
• Better handling of 3rd party links in the app - there’s been a ton of small long tail issues related to this. Around the app, we have a bunch of links to external sites. A lot of these just deadclicked on iOS. The most noticeable was probably the ‘Preview’/‘View site’ buttons in Direct. We now open 3rd party links in the web browser, no more dead clicks, and our app remains our app, within the Hospitable app context.
• Handling tel links and more - Added support for tel, sms, facetime, mailto, maps protocols. So any links in the app using those will now open the associated application. (e.g. clicking on a phone number will prompt to call the number, etc.)
• You can now use the ‘Take photo’ option to upload images within the app. Previously the option was there, but caused a crash due to app permissions

API / Connect

• You can now send images with messages by providing an array of up to three image URLs in the images attribute. This feature is available on both the reservation and inquiry message endpoints.
• Better errors when a secondary user tries to authenticate an integration.
• In our V2 API we have been returning a 404 error if no data could be found on our listing endpoint i.e /reservations. This can cause confusion as its not clear exactly what resource could not be found. We are not just returning an empty data set to be clear there are no results.

General

• We no longer send push notifications about guest reviews for muted properties.
• The Review Captured email template now shows the scheduled time in your local timezone rather than UTC.
• Hospitable's account invoice dropdown shows year and month prefix for better readability.

Direct sites now support video in the hero header section! Check out an example site 😍

To add video to your site, go to the Design tab of your Hospitable Direct site and upload a video in the Hero background video section. If you upload a video, we will no longer display any hero images. Videos up to 30MB are supported, in MP4 and other popular formats.

Lots of improvements and fixes across Direct, AI, GVR, Smart Devices, and more!

Direct

• We now send out an email notification to hosts when a payout fails after being automatically retried for 3 times.
• Resolved an issue where Booking widget would not respect calendar availability when used in combination with Multi-Property Search.
• Hosts are now notified when reservations are cancelled due to a failed payment.
• Maestro cards do not allow for MIT (Merchant Initiated Transaction) payments. We still allow Maestro cards, but will no longer attempt to capture any subsequent payments using these cards. Instead, we immediately fire off the 'failed payment' flow, which will send a mail to the customer with a payment link, through which they can make a CIT (Customer Initiated Transaction) payment.
• The guest picker can now be closed both by clicking outside of it as well as using the now added close button. Small but mighty.

AI

• Suggest with AI is now aware of property fees such as pets, community, and others, as well as weekly and monthly discounts that you have configured on the property level.
• After a bit of a rollercoaster, we think the language being used by Suggest with AI is now in a much better state.

Guest Portal

• We were not displaying additional house rules in the Guest Portal before. Oops!

Ad-hoc Guest Verification

• ...is not available to 100% of beta hosts! Try it out (first one's free, on us) and share your feedback with us.

Google Vacation Rentals (GVR)

• Fixed two price inaccuracies related to rounding and taxes.

Airbnb PMS

• Availability rules are now reflected in our calendar UI. Clicking on a day that is closed due to an availability rule, we'll show that availability rule name as the source.
• You can now add manual overrides on days closed by an availability rule, meaning you can "hard" open or close a day outside the availability window.

Smart Devices

• Previously, we did not display device codes to secondary users unless they had access to all properties. Moving forward, a secondary user will be able to correctly see codes for every property that they have individual access to.

Platform / Connect

• Our documentation said we return attachments when retrieving messages... Turns out we weren't! We now return image attachments.

Inbox

• Activity rules (such as a message on every new reservation) scoped to Airbnb co-hosts specifically wouldn't show up in the Inbox sidebar. This is now fixed.

General Improvements and Fixes

• We've made some improvements to the way platform and host scoping interact in the user interface, to make it easier to understand and spot any issues. This doesn't affect existing rule scopes.
• Improved the security of the new user signup process in one particular edge case. This makes the app safer for everyone by hindering bad actors.
• Similarly, we now prevent workaround email signups such as [email protected].

Recent releases, improvements, and fixes across Inbox, Guest Experience, Calendar, and more.

Messaging

• Fixed scheduled messages not being generated for some customers in the past 2-3 weeks. This affected rules that were scoped to specific Airbnb hosts (rather than all hosts).

Calendar

• You can now restrict check-in and checkout on available days from the calendar. Find out more here.

AI

• Fixed the interaction between the clear button and the Improve with AI button. Changes to the AI-generated messages now consistently bring up the improve button.
• Fixed the wrong language being used to generate some Suggest with AI messages.
• Historical replies to other guests from the last 18 months are now automatically being used as additional context for Suggest with AI.

Google Vacation Rentals

• We're now syncing a large (31) list of amenities to GVR.

Inbox

• Fixed some Airbnb reactions not being recognized correctly.

Platform / Connect

• We have only ever exposed reservations in the API. We now have a new set of Inquiry endpoints to allow hosts and vendors to retrieve and message these guests. We've got new docs up here.
• As part of an ongoing project to expand the property information in our API, we have added a new include and a few fields to the base property object. More details here.

Other Improvements

• Fixed how Reset Property Names works.
• Fixed how we interpret positive (rather than negative) reservation financial adjustments coming from Airbnb.

You can now restrict check-in and checkout from the Hospitable calendar for any day across all of your connected channels. This means that you now have control over exactly how your available days can be used, whether they're available for guests to check-in, checkout or just stay through. Check out our help article for more info.

As part of the upcoming improvements to our Airbnb integration, we are also gradually rolling out the ability to restrict check-in and checkout by day of the week. Learn more in our help article about Availability rules.

Connectivity

• Booking.com default check-in and check-out time imports were incorrect in many cases. This has now been fixed.
• Incoming VRBO messages are now (finally!) marking conversations as unread again.

Direct

• We received good feedback on our single property site feature, it seems the hosts really liked their hero section! So we've added the hero section back to single property sites, although not all templates are supported. These templates did not receive the new hero: Warm and Homey, Fun, Cabin in the Woods.
• We have just shipped alterations support for reservations with payment terms that meet the following conditions: 1) the alteration should not result in a refund and 2) the check-in date should not be changed. If these two conditions are met, we can safely keep payment terms without having to recalculate them, and we will simply collect the gap to the next term when the alteration is made. When payment terms cannot be gracefully kept with an alteration, the full remaining payment is collected.
• For Direct and manual bookings, instead of showing images in the conversation, we used to show an attachment link. The behavior here is now in line with other platforms - we’re always going to display an image in the conversation. If the attachment is a PDF, however, we will still display the link as before.

Guest Experience

• We were not populating the short code list correctly for question rule templates, resulting in wifi-related short codes being missing. They are visible now.
• We removed the "strength" indicator from available Questions. This was from a much earlier iteration of the Hospitable app and hasn't served a real purpose for a while.
• We are now detecting the correct language with messaging rules for Hebrew guests.

Connect / Platform

• As previously communicated to partners, we have deprecated the legacy financials include in the reservations API some time ago. Next week we will fully switch over to the new format. API requests using the legacy financials include will stop working.
• Legacy API keys will be shown once and hidden on subsequent page loads for added security.

Guest Verification

• When an ad hoc verification needed further review we were surfacing the message in the inbox, but the action to review was hidden in the sidebar. We now have a specific message and action front and center within the messages.

AI

• An issue was fixed in which the AI was offering wrong date availability information for inquiry replies.

Tasks

• We fixed an issue with deleting tasks. Go forth and delete!

Metrics

• We are now including all tasks on metric exports when no specific filters are set. Tasks not linked to reservations were previously missing, but not anymore.

Apps / Integrations

• We fixed a small icon discrepancy in the Smart Devices page.
• In case you missed it: our TTLock integration is now live.

After successful private testing, we’re excited to announce that the TTLock smart locks integration is now available for all users!

To get started, head over to the Setup page in your Device Dashboard and click Connect. From there, select TTLock from the list of supported integrations. Once connected, we’ll immediately begin creating and managing codes for all your reservations!

Check out our help article to see which TTLock devices we support

Owner Statements

• For a while we were showing financials for the wrong month on draft statements. If July was not yet published, on the August statement it would show both August and July. This now works as expected and only shows the relevant data.
• We fixed a discrepancy between a few internal systems in the way denied Direct reservations were being interpreted. That resulted in different treatment of the financials, which meant that sometimes denied Direct reservations showed as cancelled reservations with a payout, which skewed Metrics and Owner Statements.

Direct

• This week we have introduced Single Property Sites. This means that hosts with only 1 property attached to their site will only have a single page, which is the property detail page. We want to make the journey for the visitor more clear, and reduce the amount of clicks needed to get to valuable content. If there is just a single property it does not make a lot of sense to display a grid of cards and a search widget.

Inbox

• As announced in this week’s Town Hall, Suggest with AI is now able to use previous conversations to find similar replies and add that to the AI’s context for better relevance and tone of voice adherence. This is automatically enabled, with no additional work required on your part. We have over 100 million messages to get through though, so it’s a gradual rollout. 1000 customers get this new functionality automatically this week, followed by all customers next week.
• If the Suggest with AI result is not to your liking at all and you’re on mobile, you can now easily wipe it all out by clicking on the new Clear button after Suggest with AI finishes writing its AI message. No more painful to remove it word by word on mobile. We hope that you have less and less need to use that button as time goes on.
• Added a clearer message when searching and the attempted search text is longer than we allow. Previously it was throwing a generic error.

Connect / Platform

• We had reports from vendors about users who were getting an error when logging in. The error messaging on this form has been aligned with our standard login to remove confusion.

Metrics

• We fixed an issue with how some old/removed data was being wrongly used for calculating the Unavailable Nights statistic.

Messaging Rules

• Fixed an issue where parts of the listing address were being duplicated in Manual and Direct bookings when using the % listing_full_address% short code.

Knowledge Hub

• The “Ask the AI” section is working again.

Guest Verification

• A little bit of visual cleanup around the guest verification status in the Inbox, as well as making it clearer that the first one is on us, so go ahead and give it a try!

General

• We’re now sorting properties on Active Properties page by the Active status. First we’re going to show all active properties, then free.
• Hospitable now requires users to choose stronger passwords by enforcing some complexity rules. This only applies to passwords of new signups and users who intentionally choose to update their passwords. Users will not be requested/forced to update their passwords. Along with this, we’ve also added some visual clarity when showing password-related errors.