New Direct sites and property search improvements

New Direct sites

We recently made a big change behind the scenes to our Direct booking sites. The new sites load much faster and have better SEO, but otherwise, you probably didn't notice too many differences just yet. The big win for Hospitable is that we moved off a third-party provider that was slowing us down, and we now have a custom-built, in-house solution that is built to scale. Stay tuned for upcoming improvements to tracking, analytics, template design, and new site features.

Property site search improvements

You can now choose to hide the location field on your Direct property search bar. To hide the location drop-down, just remove all of your locations from your property search settings in Direct > Site > Property Search.

Property search results show both available properties that match all of the search parameters, and unavailable properties too. We got feedback from hosts that the distinction wasn't clear enough so we've now added header text between the sections and dropped the opacity of unavailable properties to 50%. We like the results.

Property search API

For hosts who have self-hosted sites and don't want to use Hospitable's property search widgets, you can now implement your own custom implementation of property search using our API. Check out our Property search API documentation.

Legacy booking widget

We've been talking about shutting down the legacy booking widget for many months, but we've always struggled to reach hosts, so we keep pushing back the deadline. Now we're displaying the message right on the legacy widgets so it's easy to tell if your self-hosted site is impacted. If you see this message, follow the instructions on our support doc to update your widget. Legacy widgets will not return any availability after March 31st. Note: if you use a Hospitable site you are not impacted.