We've released an improvement that allows you to take full control of your smart lock codes from within your lock app. Thanks to some fantastic work from our integration partner, you are now able to make external updates to your smart lock codes. Your convenience is our priority!

While we're excited to provide this feature, we will retain strict control over created backup codes to safeguard the full functionality and security of your locks.

And don't forget, you can always fine-tune your code timing directly in Hospitable by adjusting check-in and check-out times in your Inbox conversation or by customizing your buffers in the smart lock settings.

This is just the beginning of a more convenient and secure smart lock experience with Hospitable! 🌟

Vrbo has been misinterpreting Hospitable's iCal for a few months, occasionally resulting in reservation blocks being off by one day for those in certain time zones. When we realized that a fix wasn't on the horizon from Vrbo, we decided to take matters into our own hands. We've set up some clever adjustments to ensure that Vrbo interprets Hospitable's iCal correctly and blocks off the days precisely, no matter where you are in the world. Now, you can expect alignment between your Hospitable calendar and your Vrbo calendar whenever Vrbo uses the Hospitable iCal to block dates. 📆

Note: Other platforms have been interpreting Hospitable's iCal correctly all along, and nothing is expected to change there.

​

Following up on last week's launch of Direct's integration with Google Vacation Rentals (GVR), we're happy to announce several improvements:

• Custom domains are now supported!
• We've started sending your guest rating from available OTA channels to Google to help improve your property's ranking in search results. These should start showing up within a week. You'll see your property's score out of five as well as the number of total reviews.
• We're now displaying the listing status of your GVR property on the Direct Channels page. Your property will display a Pending badge while Google is reviewing it. Once your property is live on Google, you will see a green View on Google button. Click on the button to open the property's GVR landing page. If there are any problems, we will display a yellow Issues badge. Hover on the badge to see the feedback from Google.

Great news! In the past, we were unable to handle large attachments in messages from Booking.com guests, which sometimes led to messages getting stuck.

We have now made improvements to our system that allow us to seamlessly import and download large message attachments from your Booking.com guests without any hiccups!

There were several exciting Direct updates in this week's Town Hall, chief among them that we went live with our long awaited integration with Google Vacation Rentals (GVR). Google is a 100% free channel that sends leads to your Direct site.

Direct Basic and Premium hosts who are using Hospitable sites and domains are now able to add eligible properties to Google in Direct's Channels tab. Check out our help article for the full list of Google's requirements.

Custom domains

We hope to add support for custom domains by next Friday, October 13th. We delayed these until we passed the initial Google audit as they add complexity and we need to implement additional controls to prevent a drop in our platform quality score.

Reviews

We intend to start syncing reviews from Airbnb listings to their corresponding GVR listing starting next week.

Upcoming improvements

We'll also be adding a status (live/pending/issues) for listings. As it can take up to two weeks for Google to process new properties, the status will be helpful to monitor your progress. We are also investigating if we are able to fetch the links for each Google listing so you don't have to find it yourself.

Following that we will be working on a solution for custom sites, syncing your Direct cancellation policy, and custom brands for GVR listings.

We announced on August 23rd Hospitable Town Hall our intention to launch Priority Support. Thanks to your feedback, this is now live and available for beta users first.

All customers will always be serviced by the same our Award-Winning team, with the highest satisfaction score in the industry (according to G2), but for an extra fee, you can get access to

• WhatsApp: Interact with our support team via our WhatsApp phone number and send voice messages while you are on the go.
• Priority: All your new conversations are flagged as a priority and ranked first for our live chat agents.
• Phone support [Coming Soon]: Whenever we are ready to launch phone support, you will be the first to know and test it out.

This feature is now available to all users.

Ad hoc refunds

Both Premium and Basic hosts can now choose to return any portion of a booking to the guest, up to fourteen days after the reservation ends. Click the Send or request money button from the Inbox inner sidebar and enter an amount to refund. See details.

Ad hoc payment requests are coming next.

Legacy sites and widgets

We recently discontinued support for Hospitable sites that don't have an active Direct plan.

We also will be winding down support for our legacy widgets soon. We have updated the URLs on our new widgets so that we can customize widget color schemes and, in the future, track your conversion rates. Check out this article for instructions on how to update your widget.

Instant Book for Basic

We recently extended our Instant Book feature to Direct Basic reservations.

We also added an optional "last-minute" condition that all Direct customers can use to disable Instant Book if the booking is within X days of check-in.

Payout History page

We completely remade the Payout History page, which now displays your current balance, and for Premium users, your payouts in the last 30 days and upcoming 30 days. Each reservation can be expanded to reveal any alterations, refunds, and adjustments. We now display the property name and other reservation data, and you can click on the reservation ID to open the conversation in the Inbox.

Property < Direct tab

There's now a super helpful Direct section on each property page. After selecting a property, click on Direct in the inner sidebar to get quick access to the property's site and widget links, the cancellation policy, the payout method, active promo codes, and, for Premium customers, the current tax rates.

Fees pulled from Airbnb

We fixed an issue with how we were pulling percentage-based fees from Airbnb for management, community and resort fees. Specifically, if you had a percentage fee set, we were saving it in Hospitable as a fixed fee (eg. $3 instead of 3%). This would only have impacted your Direct price calculation.

Have you ever been on the go when you received a mobile notification from Hospitable, only to realize you're asked to log in... again?

Previously if any user on an account changed their password, everyone on that account would be forcefully logged out of Hospitable, even the users who didn't change their password. This was especially impactful for accounts with several secondary users. Now, these security logouts are user-based, not account-based, so if a user changes their password, only the user who changed their password will be logged out on other devices, but the rest of the users on that account will remain logged in.

We have our eyes on a few more improvements to prevent these forced logouts while still maintaining high security standards.

We've addressed the confusion surrounding smart lock backup code messages. Previously, it appeared as if these messages were always scheduled to be sent.

We've now cleared this up, and you will only see backup code messages in your messaging logs if they are actually sent!

We're launching support for the Igloo and Nuki lock apps to select users🎉

If you want early access to these integrations as a beta tester, let us know by applying to part of the test group!