Stories, playbooks, and field notes for short-term rental hosts and management firms.

The vacation rental landscape has become anything but a vacation

Booking a vacation rental has become an easy online task. 

Seamlessly finding the best-of-the-best vacation rentals at the best-available price is harder than it's ever been.

You already know the feeling. You open your go-to vacation rental platform to plan a trip and after a quick scroll you already feel exhausted. Way too many options. Half look identical. Then, when you finally find a place that looks interesting, it's hard to navigate the listing page to find the key details you actually want to know about.

But finally, you end up finding a place that fits what you need. And then SMACK. You get hit in the face by a steep booking costs, limited interaction with the host, and the feeling that you're just being pressured to book ASAP. 

 lets you discover restaurants on Resy or OpenTable. 

 a restaurants on Resy or OpenTable. They find them on Instagram, TikTok, Google Maps, Yelp, blog articles, etc. Then, once they've discovered and their interest has been peaked, they 

 have the option to book a reservation on Resy or OpenTable. 

"Almost every category that involves online booking has a curation/discovery layer that lives above the booking layer.

Stays sits on top of the existing booking ecosystem. It's not replacing it.  

 another major booking platform (also called an 'online travel agency' or 'OTA' for short) like Airbnb, Vrbo, or Booking.com. It's not of just another niche booking website that aggregates any vacation rental a property manager will allow them to synch with. 

Stays works along side Airbnb, Vrbo, and other OTAs and property management tools. We're an adjacent platform that enhances the experience of eager travelers by giving them curation, optionality, and access to savings. All while simultaneously helping quality hosts have better control of their booking funnel and marketing.

Travelers can find a vacation rental on Stays. Then Book it wherever makes the most sense.

Since Stays doesn't manage the booking transactions ourselves, and we don't lock travelers or hosts into our platform. We're unique in the sense that we want to to bridge the gap between travelers and hosts; not force control over our users so we can maintain a middleman position to profit off the booking.

10-15 years ago, booking a vacation rental online was a real problem. No centralized search, no buyer protection, no way to verify a property even existed. The major OTA platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com solved that by:

That breakthrough deserves credit. But over time, something else happened.

Have the major OTAs created a moat between travelers and hosts?

As the OTAs built the infrastructure that made online booking feel safe and seamless, they also became the default gatekeepers of travel discovery itself. Travelers stopped searching for properties independently because they no longer needed to. The OTA platforms became the singular point of discovery, information, and transaction. 

Meanwhile, the underlying technology quietly evolved and expanded. Booking through an OTA no longer became necessarily for a simple, safe, and secure booking process. 

Today, many hosts operate direct booking websites that are operated through sophisticated property management software (PMS).

We refer to this process of booking a vacation rental through a host's private website as 

Direct bookings usually have many of same protections travelers associate with OTAs like Airbnb or Vrbo: secure payment processing, refund policies, identity verification, guest communication systems, damage protection, etc.

Wait a second: if the major OTAs are no longer totally necessary to complete secure online vacation rental bookings, then why are they still so popular?  Because they still dominate discovery. 

Right now, if a vacation rental isn't lsited on Airbnb or Vrbo, how are travelers supposed to find it?

Vacation rental discovery is dominated by OTAs. Is that a problem?

This dominance of discovery and abundant supply of options actually benefits the traveler when the travel is needed as a utility. If you simply need a place to sleep for a night, the major OTA platforms are incredibly efficient. You enter your dates, apply a few filters, and instantly receive hundreds of options. Most aren't great, but many get the job done.

But that model starts to break down when the travel is supposed to be more than just a utility for accommodation. When stay itself is part of the travel experience.

A design-forward cabin in the woods. A one-of-a-kind desert retreat. A lake house your family returns to every summer. These are not commodity purchases. They are emotionally driven destinations that often define the trip itself.

Yet the large OTA algorithms are not optimized around emotional discovery. They prioritize things like review volume, conversion rates, and recency. Those systems are designed to maximize transactional efficiency, not help travelers discover the most meaningful or distinctive places at a cost that makes sense for them.

As a result, unique properties often get buried beneath thousands of nearly interchangeable listings. Independent hosts with incredible stays compete against massive property management companies operating entire portfolios of similar units. 

Are travelers even seeing the properties they want?

There is another limitation with OTAs that almost nobody talks about.

The moment you enter your travel dates into a traditional booking platform, every unavailable property 

from view entirely. A stay you would have loved might technically exist, but if it is booked for your selected dates, you may never even discover it.

That creates a very transactional version of travel inspiration and vacation rental discovery. You're not discovering stays; you're only discovering currently available inventory that's ready for purchase. And that makes sense—the OTA only benefits if you actually complete a booking in that moment, so why would they show you anything that might potentially distract from that goal?

Stays approaches this differently.

Save the stay for later. Join its waitlist. Track cancellations or price drops. Follow the host/stay on social media. 

The stay becomes something you discover and follow over time, not just something you happen to see during a filtered search. It allows stays to be treated like pieces of art, not commodities. 

What does Stays actually do for travelers like you?

The Stays platform isn't yet available to travelers. Why? Because we're obsessed with building out the platform's infrastructure to provide nothing but utility, value, and joy to our audience of travel-lovers. So until we're ready to deliver on that, we're only accepting vacation rental hosts on the platform.

Once live to travelers, here's a few things they'll enjoy:

Curation by humans, not aggregation tools

Every vacation rental on Stays is reviewed and approved by humans, with discernment and taste. We look at design, location, host quality, and whether a property actually delivers on the kind of trip it claims to offer. No generic listings dumped into the directory to bolster inventory. If a vacation rental property made it onto Stays, it earned the spot.

Every vacation rental listed on Stays can display ALL their available booking options: direct booking, Airbnb, Vrbo, etc. Given the available options, you can review and choose whichever seems to be the best option for you to complete the booking on. Hosts can also list exclusive 

 to inspire travelers to come stay with them a the best-available rate.

A starting point that works with everything

Stays isn't a walled garden. Browse here. Save the stays you love. Book them wherever you want. We're built to be the first step in trip planning, not the only one.

An expanding arsenal of features for those who love to stay 

Since Stays doesn't need to rely on controlling the transactional process if booking a vacation rental, we can really design our platform to serve you, the traveler. As our Stays platform continues to develop, our priority is to keep adding features that allow you to get the most out of your vacation rental experience. 

What does Stays do for hosts? And why should you care?

Most of you reading this will never host a vacation rental, but it's important to understand "what hosts get out of it" when it comes to Stays. The piper always has to get paid, so understanding the benefits to hosts will help paint a better picture of why Stays is so incredible for everyone involved.

They run on bookings, reviews, and word-of-mouth. But unlike restaurants and hotels, they've had almost no way to build a brand outside the OTA they depend on. That's a problem.

As mentioned before, imagine if restaurants could only be found on Resy or OpenTable. No social media. No Google maps. No Yelp. Just Resy. And then having to pay Resy a cut on every reservation, with no way to grow a guest relationship or audience of their own. That's roughly the world vacation rental hosts have been living in for the last fifteen years.

Stays gives hosts a place to show up beyond the OTA search results: a curated audience, a real brand presence, and a direct-booking path that lets them keep more of what they earn; and then 

direct those savings back to their guests. 

Over 2,000 travelers are already on the Stays waitlist. We're onboarding our first cohort of hosts and building toward a full public launch, with curated regional collections rolling out across the U.S. through the rest of the year. Bigger infrastructure integrations come after that.

The short version: vacation rental discovery has been broken for a long time, and Stays is what fixes it. Get on the list before launch and you'll see what we mean.

Want first access?

This new vacation rental platform isn't just another niche booking website

What is Stays?

The dogwoods came in last week. By next weekend, the lilacs will be heavy enough to bend the branches, and the light at seven in the evening will turn every west-facing porch into a film set. If your property has so much as a window box, you're sitting on the most photogenic six weeks of the year — and most hosts will let it slip past while they're still scheduling content from last August's golden hour shoot.

The cherry blossoms have finished their headline act, summer hasn't kicked in, and the calendar between Easter and Memorial Day reads like a lull. But the feed is hungry for green right now — for warmth that isn't yet the punishing heat of July, for that specific in-between aesthetic that travelers respond to even when they can't name it. 

Hosts tend to plan content around their two booking peaks — summer and the winter holidays — and treat the months between as quiet seasons to be endured. The mistake hides in plain sight: the audience scrolling Instagram in late April and early May is 

 the audience that just booked Memorial Day. It's the audience deciding where to go in July, in August, over Labor Day.

What you're really doing in late spring

A creek you couldn't have shot in February. A wisteria trellis that's closed for business by early June. A morning fog over the lake that won't read the same way once the haze of August settles in.

What Bloom Season Actually Looks Like, Region by Region

The mistake hosts make next is shooting “spring” as a generic concept — sunshine, a vase of tulips on the kitchen island, done. Travelers don't book generic. 

 So the question to ask is what your specific corner of the map is doing right now that it won't be doing in three weeks.

If you don't know what's blooming around your rental this week, that's the assignment.

 Walk the property line. Drive the two-mile loop. 

A single morning of intentional shooting in late April can carry a feed through June. Here is the reframe: instead of trying to capture 

. The hero shots are not the listing photos you already have. They are the new ones — the ones that wouldn't exist if you were doing this in October.

Pace the rollout

Captions That Sell the Season Without Sounding Like a Brochure

The temptation in destination content is to over-explain. Resist it. Travelers don't need to be 

 that May is a beautiful time to visit. They need to 

 it. The strongest captions in this window are short, sensory, and specific: the name of the tree that's blooming, the time the sun set last night, the temperature when you opened the windows that morning.

If you're going to include a call to book, save it for the second slide of a carousel or the last line of a longer caption. The first line is for the scroll-stop.

If your property is sitting on a great late-spring moment and you're not sure how to capture it, that's exactly what we're here for.

The Stays Blog

Stories, playbooks, and field notes for short-term rental hosts and management firms.

What is Stays?

Stays Editorial

Bloom Season

Signing out...