Our new property search feature is now live for Hospitable Direct sites, allowing guests to search availability across all of your properties, with results displayed on a map. The feature is opt-in for existing sites, so you can turn it on whenever you're ready from within your site settings. Learn how to customize the locations you display in our support article: How to setup property search.
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We hope to release property search as a widget for non-Hospitable sites in the next 2-3 weeks.

💳 Ad hoc charges

The Send or receive money button can now be used to request any additional payment from guests on Direct Basic and Premium reservations. We send an email to the guest with a payment link and display an event in the Inbox when the payment is received. Note that these payments will have any applicable taxes deducted, and for Premium, the 6% guest service fee is deducted, while Basic customers will have the normal payment processing fees deducted by Stripe.
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🐾 Pet fees

We now allow guests to enter their pet count, not including service animals, in the Direct booking widget. We collect any fee you set in your Property Pricing page (pulled from Airbnb, initially). Finally!!!

🔎 Property search

The private pilot of our new property search widget has been going really well. We plan to release the widget as an option for all Hospitable sites on Monday. Then we will do the work to provide the widget for our customers using non-Hospitable sites, which as an added bonus, will allow us to list non-Hospitable sites on Google Vacation Rentals.
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🇵🇷 Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands

We launched Direct Premium USA earlier this year claiming that it included properties located in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, but we were missing a few steps. We've fixed that and now hosts there are able to add local payout methods for Premium.

Your Inbox is now powered by GPT-4 Turbo 🤖 🚀

Hospitable is now using GPT-4 Turbo, the latest ChatGPT model by OpenAI, to recommend even better suggestions inside your Hospitable Inbox.

This upgrade will bring improved speed and accuracy to AI Suggestions, allowing you to be the best host you can be. Head over to any conversation in your Inbox to give it a try!

We're committed to making your hosting experience smoother and more reliable. To achieve this, we're introducing an "always on" guest code communication message.

What to Expect

Enhanced Reliability: This message is tied to enabling backup codes, further reducing the chances of sending an incorrect code to your guest.

Streamlined Setups: The message is sent 10 minutes before a code becomes active, speeding up new smart lock setups.

Seamless Integration: This feature won't affect your current messaging setup, allowing you to continue using the %smartlock_code% short code in other messages.

Dynamic Messaging: Our message adapts to whether a code has been previously communicated to the guest, serving as a helpful reminder when needed.

Backup Codes - Ensuring Reliability:

For those who aren't aware, our backup codes feature is available to all users with beta features enabled. It guarantees a functional code is sent to your guest, even if the initial code setup fails.

Soon, this feature will be activated by default for all users, but consider enabling it early for added reliability!

Our success rate for users with backup codes enabled is an impressive 99.5%, with most failures due to an account needing to be reconnected.

Learn more about these features here.

Searching ranking boost 🚀

Google is now displaying your property type (entire house, apartment, villa, etc) and your aggregate review score from connected OTA channels. Both of these attributes improve your ranking in search results and should boost conversions.

Custom sites coming soon

Our GVR integration currently only supports Hospitable sites (including custom domains). We are starting work next week on the features needed to support custom sites that are using Hospitable booking widgets. Stay tuned for good news!

If you have your Hospitable preferences enabled for beta features, then you now have early access to integrate your IglooHome smart locks!

Just go to your Apps page, select the IglooHome app card, and click Connect. We'll start creating and managing the codes for all your reservations right away!

Check out our help article to see which IglooHome locks we support

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.

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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!