Latest News from the Hospitable.com team
Improvement

Hospitable AI has been upgraded

Anmol avatar
Shared by Anmol • November 09, 2023

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!

Feature update

🔒 New Guest Smart Lock Code Communication

Alyssa avatar
Shared by Alyssa • November 08, 2023

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.

Improvement

Google Vacation Rentals updates

Andrew avatar
Shared by Andrew • November 04, 2023

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!

Feature update

🔓 IglooHome Locks Integration in Public Beta

Alyssa avatar
Shared by Alyssa • October 30, 2023

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

Improvement
Feature update

🔓 You can now modify smart lock codes within your lock app

Alyssa avatar
Shared by Alyssa • October 18, 2023

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! 🌟

📆 Hospitable iCal's are now being interpreted correctly on Vrbo

Toby avatar
Shared by Toby • October 16, 2023

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.


Improvement

Google Vacation Rentals updates

Andrew avatar
Shared by Andrew • October 10, 2023

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.
Improvement

Support for large attachments in Booking.com messages

Alyssa avatar
Shared by Alyssa • October 09, 2023

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!

New

🎉 Google Vacation Rentals is Live!

Andrew avatar
Shared by Andrew • October 06, 2023

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.

New feature

Priority Support

Pierre-Camille avatar
Shared by Pierre-Camille • October 06, 2023

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.