Hostaway 2020 In Review

Hostaway's 2020 In Review

2020 has been a crazy year for everyone including the team at Hostaway. The impact of the pandemic and travel restrictions has been hard felt in the vacation rental industry. Hostaway has been astounded by the determination, compassion, and resilience of our partners and clients.

Despite the turbulent year, Hostaways product and development teams have been hard at work to improve our product and develop new features!

Take a look at some the big product and development highlights of 2020!

Channel Management

Channel management is a core feature of Hostaway’s system and a major focus of 2020! Our APIs for Airbnb, Booking, VRBO, and Expedia were all strengthened and expanded during the year. We also expanded the features of Hostaway’s direct booking websites and WordPress Plugin.

Airbnb

• Official to Preferred partner path • Seasonal Rules/Special Offers • Request to Book • Messaging API • Airbnb markup • Airbnb content export (limited) • Guest Reviews • Kept connection quality over required threshold

Booking.com

• Messaging API trusted partner. • Kept Preferred partner status for a 3rd year in a row • Allow for same day booking • Guest Reviews • Kept connection quality over required threshold (99.9%)

VRBO

• Adopted more amenities • Deposit Paid at Location • Better Export flow and support • Booking Lead Time • Support for non-instant book reservations (Request to book) • Kept connection quality over required threshold

Expedia

• General improvements (more focus in 2021)

Hostaway

• Marketing tools (Coupons) • Direct Reservation flow improvement (breakdowns and payment flow - removed the need to use the guest portal). • Optional fees (extra services), optional discounts.

Property Management System

The Hostaway suite of features benefited by drastically in 2020 with some major updates and improvements. On top of polishing the current features, Hostaway is always expanding the product offering by adding brand new features! 2020 was an unreal year for new features and new integrations. Hostaways list of industry integrations is now at an astounding 35!

Message Automations

• Released Manage Messages module (manage messages created from automations) • Added more filters and sorting options • Assign automations to one or multiple listings

Calendar

• New interface, focus on the multicalendar • Faster load times • More data visualization options • Notes • Send Special Offers, create Seasonal Rules • Add direct bookings from multicalendar

Financial Reporting

• Visualize your portfolio or listing level financial health • The most flexible formula system to create your own reports. • New Tax set up • Visualization of price breakdown in reservations.

Payments

• Support for multiple Stripe accounts • Guest Credit Card pre-auth system to manage deposits • Adopted check-out forms that help Stripe and Braintree better evaluate risk & fraud.

Other

• Listings Tagging system • Introduced support for Boutique hotels, aparthotels and customers with multi-unit set ups. • Multiple Hostaway API key (to allow you to connect to multiple partners)