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Show HN: I'm trying to map all vacation rentals you can book direct (staythere.ai)

1 points by wthayer ↗ HN
Hi HN,

StayThere.ai started because I was trying to get more repeat guests to book directly instead of through Airbnb. About two years ago I took over managing seven short term rentals, which has since grown to 33. I started texting guests a link to our direct booking website after checkout and added QR code table toppers in each unit so guests could easily book direct the next time they visited or contact us if they needed anything.

One thing that always bothered me was that guests couldn't add pets when booking through our PMS's booking site, so I decided to build my own frontend on top of Guesty. That quickly turned into a deep Guesty integration using OAuth and webhooks, with Guesty remaining the source of truth while my frontend handled reservations, pricing, availability, messaging, guest accounts, automations, and tokenized Stripe payments. Once I had it working, I rebuilt it as a multi host platform where other property managers could connect their PMS and get their own direct booking website.

The software worked, but growing it didn't. The farther I got from hosts I didn't already know, the harder it became to convince someone to create an account, connect their PMS through OAuth, and trust a platform they had never used before. After a while I realized I was solving the wrong problem. Hosts already had direct booking websites. Instead of trying to replace them, why not make them searchable?

At first I was manually finding booking websites through Google and feeding them into a crawler I wrote. Eventually I built another crawler whose only job was finding websites for the indexing crawler. Today StayThere indexes 96,485 vacation rental listings from 3,124 host websites across 92 countries. You can browse properties on a map, preview a listing, choose your dates, and continue into the host's existing booking flow with those dates carried over for live pricing and availability. The map isn't fully availability aware yet, but that's what I'm working on next along with constantly adding more listings.

If you made it this far thank! Happy to answer any questions!

2 comments

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[dead] sightspinner
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wthayer
That's a fair concern. StayThere only indexes listings from established PMSs like Guesty, Hospitable, Lodgify, and Hostaway. In many cases, those listings were originally imported from Airbnb or other OTAs when the host joined their PMS, which then created their direct booking website and distributed those listings across additional channels.

StayThere doesn't change the regulatory status of a property. Hosts are still responsible for complying with the local laws and regulations wherever they operate, just as they are when accepting bookings anywhere.

So unlike an open marketplace where anyone can create a listing, these properties typically already have an operating history. Longer term, I want to surface additional trust signals like open-format Q&A, years hosting, reputation metrics, and more reviews where available, so guests can better judge whether a host is a safe bet. Some PMSs also aggregate OTA reviews onto their direct booking sites, allowing that reputation to carry over.