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.

Payment terms

We've finished rolling out Direct's new payment terms feature, which is now available to all Direct Basic and Premium hosts. Guests on qualifying reservations now have the option, at no additional cost, to pay in up to three installments. We also lowered the minimum reservation value to trigger payment terms to US$100 or equivalent.

We enable payment terms by default, but Hospitable can only offer guests multiple payments if you have a cancellation policy with sufficiently spaced refundable checkpoints. Read more or jump to your booking policy manager to manage your settings.

Premium fee update

We retired the Direct Premium 6% + $10 guest fee that applied to hosts on our legacy pricing plan. Now all Premium hosts will have the same 4% guest + 3% host fee. If you are a legacy Direct Premium host, this update went live today and we simultaneously added 3% to your Direct markup rates to account for the new 3% host fee.
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Removing the fixed fee ($10) component allowed us to provide a long-requested feature to hide Premium fees as a host-only fee. You now have the option to switch to a 7% host-only fee from the booking policy manager. If you do that, we recommend updating your Direct markup rates to 7% to make the change revenue neutral for you.

Terms & Conditions

We made a small update on the Review & Confirm screen of the Direct booking flow to get explicit acceptance of your house rules. We also added language to support payment terms, when applicable, acknowledging that if the guest fails to make scheduled payments, it may result in the cancellation of their booking.

We Now Support Operations-only Locks

You can now connect and manage the codes on operations locks (ex. supply closet)! Previously there was no way to connect to these locks without enabling guest access. Now you can select to disable Guest Access when connecting the lock, or after connecting by selecting the lock in the device dashboard and editing the setting.

Bulk-Create Operations Codes

In case you missed it, as of last month you can bulk-create operations codes (ex. codes for your cleaners) across multiple properties! Previously you could only create a code at one property at a time. Now, as long as the selected properties are in the same timezone, you're good to go.

Check out our device dashboard walkthrough article on how to create manual operations codes.

Are You Using Smart Thermostats?
Let us know what you're using by voting on integrations for Honeywell, Ecobee, or others! This helps us better determine what to build next.

We're constantly working on improving the accuracy and relevance of the suggestions that our AI provides in the Inbox.

Here are some AI parts of the app that have received some love from the product and engineering team over the last 30 days:

Inbox - Suggest with AI

• The Inbox messages written using the Suggest with AI button now have a better awareness of the status of the booking (inquiry, pending, accepted), as well as check-in and check-out times.
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• The AI behind those messages has been improved to fix the cases where it tried to either respond to an old guest message or even tried to respond *as* the guest. 😵‍💫
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• These AI messages now also use the AI-generated Guest Summaries for more context and personalization.
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• And these message now use the same language that the host has been using in that conversation.

Inbox - Guest Summaries

• AI Guest Summaries got a small upgrade recently and should now be better at providing actionable insights.

Reviews and Review Replies

• The new Awaiting Review Reply segment in the Inbox and the Pending Review Replies tab in Guest Experience show you which guest reviews have yet to be replied to, with an AI-generated reply already waiting for you to use if you want.