New

Free Turno

This is kind of a big deal. Turno offered to give all Hospitable customers free use of their best-in-class operations software: auto-scheduling, auto payments, photo checklists, problem & inventory reporting, and in-app chat. Create your free Turno account.

Markup rates for Direct

If you're using Direct Basic, you could use markup rates to add 3% to your base rate and recover the payment processing fees you owe Stripe on the booking. With Direct Premium, while Hospitable does not deduct any fees from your base rate, you could use markup rates to take part of the savings that would otherwise go to the guest, and shift that to a bigger payout. You're the boss.

Markup rates for Direct are currently set at the platform-level (ie. one value for all of your Direct properties). Find them in Settings < Preferences < Properties.

Improvement

When a SMS message fails to get delivered to a team member, we'll now display that status in your Operations log. We're monitoring the error messages we get back from Twilio, and as long as they all makes sense, we'll figure out how best to notify you on failure so you don't have to check your logs.

We now show you how many pets are on a reservation. Look for the paw icon in the Inbox and on the Calendar. 🐾

Fix

Messaging rules for Direct weren't working unless you had checked the "All hosts" option. We could explain why it wasn't working, but your time is too valuable to us. The important thing is that messaging rules just work for Direct now.

New

Dynamic pricing integration with Beyond

After a month of testing with beta users, we are happy to announce that our integration with Beyond to automate dynamic pricing for your properties is now available to all of our customers.

Improvement

Better task names

In Operations Overview we changed the way tasks display. Instead of showing the task ID, we're now showing the task name. Don't worry, if you loved reading those task IDs we've got your back. Just hover over the task name and we'll unveil the ID in a tooltip just for you!

Scalability and reliability work

We had an incident which resulted in our services being intermittently unavailable over a 24 hour period from February 27th-28th. We know that's frustrating for everyone. The root cause was an unpredictably high volume of traffic to our server from a single API customer. We've put in place rate-limits now to prevent that from happening again.

During the investigation we also found a number of optimizations to improve the efficiency and resiliency of our product. You won't see any of these improvements, but we sure hope you'll feel them when you use a more stable, reliable Hospitable. Shout out to our Support and Engineering teams for their quick response.

Hospitable takes our product reliability seriously and we are all about transparency: check status.hospitable.com anytime for real-time application monitoring.

Happy hosting ❤

New

Direct Premium is in private pilot!

After much anticipation, we're so excited to announce that we've begun onboarding hosts in the USA to the Direct Premium private pilot. Direct Premium is our turn-key direct booking solution, complete with guest vetting, $5 million in damage protection, payment processing and of course… all the incredible Hospitable features you already know and love.

Complete this form to be added to the waitlist for early access to Direct Premium, and be notified when it becomes available in your country.

Improvement

Now displaying the source of calendar data

You now have the ability to see where your calendar data comes from! When you select a date or date range on your Hospitable calendar, we show you the source of your availability, price, and minimum length of stay data. If you hover over the source you can see when the current value was last changed. Our help article explains more about how your calendars are synced and how to tell where the data is coming from.

Pending requests to book show on your calendar in yellow

Since pending booking requests block availability, we're now showing those on your calendar in yellow. From the calendar, you can select the booking request and click 'Jump to conversation' to accept or reject the request. (Since booking inquiries do not block availability, we do not show them on the calendar.)

New email communication for manual and direct bookings

As part of the Direct Premium launch, we have added transactional emails to make sure every guest receives the information they need. We now send emails when a booking request is submitted, when a booking request is accepted or rejected, and when a reservation is altered or canceled. Direct Premium guests will also receive an email with their link to the guest vetting portal.

Improved inbox experience on mobile

You told us that it was difficult to know whom you were chatting with in our mobile inbox. Now we show the property name, check-in and check-out dates, and reservation status in the header of each chat. Thanks for that feedback!

Easier-to-read notifications

We were using more than one style of notification banners in the console. Some disappeared so fast you barely had time to read them. We now use a consistent banner style and give you plenty of time to read the message (there's a dismiss button for you speed readers).

Fix

• We fixed an issue where check-out tasks were linking to another reservation when the start or end times were changed.
• Our RemoteLock integration would sometimes incorrectly trigger an email that a code was not properly provisioned, even when it was provisioned just fine. This false alarm created worry when none was due, so we're happy to report that this issue is no more!

New

New dynamic pricing integration with Beyond

We're excited to announce a new integration with Beyond! This integration is currently available for our beta users who are looking to optimize their pricing strategy. If you'd like early access to this new integration you can enable beta features and start using Beyond to set dynamic pricing in Hospitable today.

Direct site templates

All ten new site templates are available to beta users! We're making lots of improvements as we prepare to launch our new Direct product to a private pilot in February. Got a cabin in the woods? A house with history? Or are Miami vibes more your style? Explore all ten templates, you're sure to find something that fits your look!

Improvement

Smart lock improvements

We're now showing generated codes in the inbox for easy reference when you're in conversation with a guest. You can also manually provision a new code if it failed to provision automatically for any reason.

Guest Experience just got smarter

Hospitable will now detect when a message is likely to be blocked by platform rules and prompt you to make a change to make sure your guest gets the message. For example, messages sent prior to a confirmed booking cannot contain phone numbers, emails or URLs, so we'll let you know ahead of time before the message is sent so you can revise your message accordingly. In addition, if a message fails for any reason you can now see why it failed in the Guest Experience log.

Inbox Live

When we initially announced Inbox Live, we designed it to refresh the conversation whenever a guest sends a message. Our larger hosts and property managers quickly pointed out that they often have multiple team members in the same conversation, so we need to refresh the conversation whenever anyone sends a message. Well, you can kiss command+R goodbye! If another team member sends a manual message from their account, conversations in the Inbox will be automatically refreshed for you so you can see messages sent in near-real time. We hope this reduces the likelihood that team members accidentally (and awkwardly!) double up on guest conversation.

Fix

Vrbo fixes

• We've fixed an issue where messages sent from the host using the Vrbo app were not being picked up by Hospitable. Now, we properly detect these messages and display them in the Inbox.
• In some cases Hospitable was not properly pulling in the Guest's name. This has been fixed for new reservations moving forward. If a reservation was made before this fix was put in place, our support team can help pull this information in for you.
• Reservations coming from Vrbo sometimes showed the inquiry/request to book date as the booking date, which meant messages were not properly scheduled when a booking was confirmed. This has been fixed.

Other fixes

• Some users were receiving false alarm emails that their smart lock codes failed to provision, when in fact they had not failed at all! We've identified and fixed the root cause, so moving forward you should only receive these notifications when a code actually fails to provision.
• If Airbnb is set as your lead platform/listing and check-out restrictions are defined in Airbnb, those restrictions will now be reflected in the direct booking widget.
• Our booking widget previously only checked the next six months of availability. Now we'll continue to update the calendar as your guests travel into the future.
• Your Reservations metrics export now includes reservations made via Direct, as it should.

New

New direct booking sites

We released three new beautiful direct booking site templates to our beta customers, and we are putting the final touches on another seven. We are launching our turn-key booking and payment processing solution Direct early 2023, so keep an eye out for that in the near future.

Smarter locks

We took the training wheels off our RemoteLock, August Home and Yale Access integrations -- these are now available to all of our hosts! Our beta users additionally have access to our SmartThings integration. Check out our full list of supported smart locks and join the nearly 2,000 Hospitable hosts who are already using smart locks to save themselves time.

A big thank you to all of our smart lock beta users for their feedback and support!

Exporting tax data

We're happy to report that the Taxes Metrics Export we mentioned in our previous update, did indeed get released. You can now export a detailed breakdown of taxes associated with your bookings. Go to Metrics, select 'Taxes' and apply whichever filters you prefer. Check out our help documentation for more details on what the tax export includes.

Improvement

Tasks and task notifications

You told us that your team members were replying to SMS task notifications, and until recently, we weren't catching those replies. Now we forward those replies to your email so the next time your cleaner replies that they are not available, you'll know to find someone else for that day. Which is good news?

Additionally, you can now choose to receive a copy of the notification being sent out to your team members, whether the notification is being sent via email or sms. Previously this was only an available option for email notifications, so we went ahead and expanded it for sms as well so you can always be in the know!

API & Webhooks

We have new and improved look for our API documentation at developer.hospitable.com!

By popular demand, we're now including the pet count in the webhook payload in the pets attribute. Check out our help article for more information about how to use the reservations webhook.

UI/UX improvements

You can now 'Resolve' an inbox conversation from directly within the thread, rather than having to navigate back to the list view. Saving you clicks on your path to inbox zero.

We've made it easier to select messages in the inbox by expanding the area you can click around the checkbox. These little improvements add up!

For Hospitable power users with many tags and saved segments, the Properties page became difficult to navigate. To reduce scrolling fatigue, we've added a 'show more' and 'show less' option.

When you're chatting with a guest, you may want to jump directly to that property's calendar to view more detailed availability information. Well, now you can by simply clicking on the mini calendar in the reservation sidebar.

In the multi-property calendar page you can now press the esc key on your keyword to de-select your start date. Note: this is only available on the calendar page for multiple properties, not the property specific calendar pages.

Onboarding experience

If you're reading this update, you're probably already a loyal Hospitable user, but we care about our new users too! We've streamlined our signup flow to enable our users to get into the product faster. We also eased off from pushing new users to connect a booking channel, and instead we let them explore the product until they are convinced Hospitable is a good fit for them.

Fix

• We corrected an issue where Direct sites were displaying the incorrect maximum number of guests.
• We fixed an issue where some scheduled messages weren't generated for accepted Vrbo bookings.
• At times an 8-digit code would be generated for a smart lock that's set to accept 4-digit codes, but no longer! We've fixed that and the expected code length is now taken into account when generating smart lock codes.
• Previously the search functionality on the active properties page wasn't behaving; it always returned no results even if it should have. After a stern talking to, search on the active properties page is now doing what it should and returning the results you search for!
• An issue where custom codes weren't populated for messages automated for Direct bookings has been fixed.
• We discovered the operations daily digest email was sometimes showing incorrect information, like the wrong check-in day, so we made some tweaks to fix this to be sure it's accurate.
• We identified the reason why some minimum stay changes weren't being pushed properly to Airbnb, and we fixed it! Now minimum stay changes should be pushed as expected.

New

Connect August and Yale locks

We're pleased to announce that integrations for Yale Access and August Home locks are now live for our first group of pilot users. As with our current pilot for RemoteLock users, we will gradually expand the pilot as we get more confident that we have worked out all the major issues before releasing to our entire community.

Search canned responses

We've made it quicker for you to use canned responses in the Inbox. Just type / in the message box, followed by any keyword to search your list of responses. As soon as the correct response is highlighted, hit "enter" to load the response. If you load the wrong response, ctrl/cmd + delete will clear the message box.

We've also sorted the list alphabetically to make browsing your responses easier.

Improvement

Taxes, fees, and discounts

When you click on the "Details" button on a reservation, say from the Calendar or Inbox, we have a section for Payment Details which had been missing, uh, details. Now you'll be able to see every tax, fee, and discount associated with the booking.

Additionally, we're working on a new Taxes Metrics Export so you can pull CSV reports detailing each tax transaction and the amount of each tax collected over a period. If you're not excited by this announcement, you're probably not an accountant.

Calendar readability

We've added a month label to the top of the calendar view, which will help make it super clear which month you're looking at. It'll scroll with you too, so you can always see it. We've also added a subtle background to todays date, to help get your bearings on a busy calendar.

Mobile UI/UX improvements

In the conversation view on mobile, we've added a platform icon - so it's easy to tell where the booking originated.

Also on mobile, we've made the guest details sticky, so you'll always be able to see them (and easily navigate back to the Inbox) as you scroll through a conversation.

Finally, we tidied up the Connected Accounts screen on mobile, which wasn't handling accounts with long email addresses well.

Manual bookings form

We've made it clearer which fields are required when creating a manual booking, and visually tidied up the page.

Fix

• We noticed that VRBO scheduled messages were taking over ten minutes to get sent out at times when we have a lot of check-ins. We gave the server a good shake and the peak processing time is now down under one minute.
• Some manual and Direct messages weren't getting sent unless you scoped the messaging rule to all hosts. You don't have to worry about that anymore.
• Airbnb inquiries were sometimes getting stuck in our system as inquiries, and not updating to Expired or Timed-out. We're now able to detect these changes and display them properly with the correct status.
• We removed the option to automatically extend pre-approvals. This hasn't been possible since the move to our Airbnb official API. We've removed the option from the interface now.
• We improved Inbox readability by adjusting the message date and time to a larger font and darker color to help it stand out a bit more.
• Smart Locks and Sync Settings pages have had text and layout adjustments to make them clearer and simpler to understand.

New

Inbox Live

Your Hospitable inbox now updates automatically whenever you receive messages from your guests. You no longer need to refresh the page to see updates to your conversations. You’ll also get push notifications whenever you’re away from the site or the mobile app, so you don’t miss a message.

Smartlocks

Our RemoteLock integration is now live for a small set of pilot users. We are working to ensure everything is running smoothly before we introduce the integration to all our users who have a RemoteLock account. Check out our growing list of supported locks.

We’re already generating over 1,000 smart lock codes per day — that’s a lot of time saved for hosts who no longer have to coordinate handing off a key or manually setting codes for their guests! We have started work on the next set of smart locks to add to our platform soon.

Improvement

• If you referred someone to Hospitable, first of all, thank you! Secondly, we now let you track the status of your referral so we can thank you properly after your referral becomes a Hospitable customer.
• We cleaned up our SMS notifications a bit: removing unwanted white space here, reducing truncation there, filtering out emoji. They look better now.
• Previously, we filtered out unlisted properties on the Property and Calendar pages without really telling you we did that and some of you were rightfully confused. We now show unlisted properties by default, sorted below listed properties. We removed the Include unlisted filter and replaced it with a one-click Hide unlisted filter. You may find it easier to mute unlisted properties so they never appear in your calendar.

Fix

Messaging

• Some emailed replies to manual reservations weren't showing up in Inbox. They now show up in the Inbox where they belong.
• We fixed an issue where images sent by some guests of a manual reservation were unable to be opened.
• Some Booking.com messages looked like they had attachments when, in fact, they did not. This has been fixed.

Tasks

• The task calendar was duplicating some tasks. No one needs more tasks. This has been fixed.
• We fixed a bug that caused previously deleted tasks to reappear if their task rule was edited.
• If a teammate responded to an SMS notification, that response wasn't always making it back to you by email. This has been fixed.

Smartlocks

• We were generating different codes for two Schlage locks matched to the same property. That's not what you want. This has been fixed.
• We made lots of general improvements to smartlock code generation, recovery if code generation fails, and monitoring health checks that all result in smartlocks running a lot more smoothly now.

Other

• Some of you told us it was difficult to distinguish between credit cards on the Payment Methods page because we weren't showing the expiration date. You were right, and we fixed that.
• There were instances when we got the host name and guest names confused for VRBO reservations. We're sorry about that. This has been fixed now.
• Some users were confused when their Reservations report export showed a payout amount of zero for Booking.com reservations. Thankfully this data was not correct, and we now accurately report your payout amount.

Improvement

Fix

During our last townhall meeting with customers, we talked a lot about consolidation. But what does that really mean?

It means we're dedicated to constantly improve the product. Not just by adding new features, but also in fixing and improving what we already have. To this end, one of the main focuses of the product and engineering team this month is on consolidation. As Matthew, our VP Customers mentioned, we are dedicated to being a reliable partner to you.

Here's a few things that we've been working on as part of that consolidation cycle:

Improving and stabilising our Vrbo integration

Earlier this month, some of our customers that integrate Hospitable.com with their Vrbo accounts had issues detecting new events and messages, and may have experienced account disconnects whenever they reconnected their Vrbo accounts.

This was mainly due to changes Vrbo made to their API. Our engineering team worked quickly to explore what had changed in the Vrbo API, and to restore service as quickly as possible.

We're restored almost all functionality from our Vrbo integration now. It is no longer possible for us to fetch guest addresses, which has an impact on Guest Insights, the 'Enforce time restrictions' setting, and some shortcodes. These limitations are only in place for Vrbo, and do not affect other channels. We're hopeful that we'll be able to regain access to the address in the future.

Improving the Booking.com connection experience

We often receive a lot of questions about connecting a Booking.com account to Hospitable. We wanted to make this a more streamlined experience that helps to guide you through the connection process.

We're getting ready to launch something for this towards the end of the week.

Smartlock improvements

We currently integrate with Schlage Encode locks, and you can get started with by going to 'Apps -> Schlage Encode'.

We're improving this integration every day, and the majority of our customers who use this integration are able to automatically provision and communicate lock codes to guests without issue. The team has also been working to improve this integration for customers that do run into issues.

While we improve the Schlage Encode experience, we also have another team dedicated to allowing us to integrate with even more types of locks, with an integration to RemoteLock.com.

Getting smarter about merging listings into properties

If you have the same listing, listed on multiple channels - they should all be associated to the same property in Hospitable.com. You'll see some changes coming soon when adding a new channel within Hospitable that prompts you whether you want to add the newly added listings into an existing property, so you won't have to go hunting for the property and merge the properties together manually.

If you have the same listings on multiple channels, it's always worth combining these into a property to take advantage of our Sync features.

Other fixes & improvements

• When using date filters, a single date can be selected now, it doesn't force you to select a range of dates.
• Fix for some metrics exports getting stuck in a 'Pending' state.
• Providing support tools to aid in Booking.com connection investigations.
• Fix for Scheduled 'New reservation' message not always being generated correctly.
• Fix for Property photo order sometimes being incorrectly sorted.
• Fix for metrics duplicated line items in Reservations and Payouts reports
• Fix for some delayed automated messages still being sent, even if a manual message was sent during the window.
• Better handling of deleting Smartlocks devices when devices are unmatched with properties.
• Improved error message display when manual messages are sent using words which Airbnb do not allow.
• Fix for the subscription page sometimes taking a long time to load.
• Sync settings page updates to improve the copy and add the ability to view Property sync status.

New

We now support the ability to inform your Airbnb guests that a security deposit is required for their stay.

What is an offline security deposit?

Hosts aren’t allowed to charge guests a security deposit through our Resolution Centre or outside the Airbnb platform. Instead, we inform guests at the time of booking that their payment method may be charged if they cause damage during a stay.

There is one exception: Hosts who manage their listings with API-connected software can set a security deposit using our offline fees feature. If a Host has done this, the deposit requirements will be clearly communicated during the booking process.

From Airbnb: https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/140/security-deposits

To get started using this feature, please check out our article: Security deposits for Airbnb.

To hear more about what else we have planned for Security deposits, Direct booking alterations & cancellations you can join us later today (Wednesday 1st June) for our Hospitable.com townhall.

Fix

Ahead of our fortnightly townhall (where we chat with our customers & investors, and share some details about what we've been up to) it seems like a good time to update you on the smaller fixes and improvements that we've delivered in the past few weeks.

• We've fixed an issue where Day of the Week messaging rules were sometimes inadvertently deleted or consolidated when they shouldn't have been. (We're working on a solution to restore those that were previously deleted too).
• Manual booking emails were not being sent to guests who had their email address changed on the booking. This has now been fixed.
• Smartlock: Various fixes where some newly added locks were not visible, some locks were duplicated, solved some rare issues where lock unmatching failed.
• We've implemented a security level-up which will automatically log out anyone using your account when your password is changed.
• Fixed an issue where new reservation messages were not always being generated correctly. This only affected some messages which were scheduled at night with the enforce time limits setting on.
• For Manual and Direct bookings - when a new messages is received from the guest, the thread will now show as unread (was previously showing as read).
• Another one for Manual and Direct bookings - we fixed an issue that prevented push notifications to go out for incoming guest messages for manual & direct conversations.
• Fixed a rare error which occurred when trying to select Canned Responses from the Inbox.
• Fixed an issue where we showed full listing descriptions instead of the listing name when trying to add a vrbo listing to a property.
• The date picker when editing a scheduled message was sometimes erroring out, resulting in the newly selected date and time not being saved correctly.

The team has also been working hard on Direct - working on allowing you to define Taxes, and our Booking flow (including payment processing). We haven't released anything for these yet, but they're getting close 😍.

Join us later today on our townhall to hear more about what we're up to. We would love to see you there.