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Welcome to Issue №5 Your direct booking setup just got a serious upgrade.Hey there, busy season looks different depending on where in the world you host, but the principle is the same everywhere: the guests checking in right now are your best shot at direct bookings for the rest of the year. This issue is about the infrastructure that makes that happen: your website, your tools, and your system for keeping guests coming back to you instead of going back to the OTAs. |
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Platform Update Your Houfy website builder just got faster and smarter.If you haven’t tried the Houfy AI Website Builder yet, you can now describe your property in one sentence and get a fully built direct booking website in minutes.
Your direct booking website is one prompt away. Build Your Website |
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Quick Win 3 things your direct booking website needs to convert guests.A website that looks nice but doesn’t book is a brochure. These three things close the gap.
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Partner Spotlight Hospitable: 50% off for Houfy hosts, for the first 3 months.Getting guests to book direct is one thing. Managing everything that comes after is another.
Hospitable is a short-term rental management platform built to handle the operational side. It connects directly with Houfy, which means your calendars stay in sync, your guest communication is automated, and you’re not stitching together three separate tools to run one property. For Houfy hosts, Hospitable is offering 50% off any monthly plan for the first three months . Use the link below to claim it. Everything in one place
Claim 50% Off Hospitable |
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Host Spotlight Meet Kim, the host who built a direct booking business from the ground up.She and her family built their Lake Lure log home themselves — then learned the hard way what platform dependency really costs. |
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“Listing sites leave hosts with very little control over their own businesses.” Kim Gissendanner · Lake Lure, NC |
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Kim’s Playbook A post-stay outreach message goes to every guest after checkout: a personal thank-you, an explicit mention of the cost savings of booking direct through Houfy, and a gentle nudge toward leaving a review. “We love to send a parting note telling them we hope they made wonderful memories and would love to welcome them back. We also ask if they’d be kind enough to leave a review, explicitly mentioning that we hope we provided them with 5-star service. It’s a great way to plant that 5-star seed in their minds.” Beyond that: a quarterly email to her mailing list to keep Laurelwood Lodge fresh in past guests’ minds. Regular social media and active SEO work. Listing text and photos refreshed consistently. The whole system is proactive by design, because waiting for guests to find their way back doesn’t work. Her advice to hosts just getting started: “Don’t expect Houfy to magically fill your calendar overnight. It takes a village. If all of us as hosts do our part to promote the Houfy platform to our guests, we can help it become a powerful competitor against the big sites.” See Laurelwood Lodge |
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From the Community Turns out most of us keep it simple.We posted a poll in the Houfy Facebook Group last week: how many tools are you running to manage your rental?
Whether you’re running a lean stack or a full ecosystem, the principle is the same: the tools should be working harder than you are. Drop your setup in the comments and let the community know what’s working for you. Join the Conversation |
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From the Houfy Blog 3 posts worth your time.Deciding on a website, choosing a builder, and marketing the high-end way.
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Want to be our next Host Spotlight? Get your story in front of 15,000 hosts for free.Every issue, one host’s story lands in the inbox of 15,000 fellow hosts, with a direct link to their listing. If you’ve got a strategy worth stealing, a hard lesson that saved you later, or a system that just works, we want to hear about it. Fill in the short form below and tell us what’s been working for you. Share Your Story |
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Houfy Direct bookings made simple
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