What is Stays?

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.

This is what Stays was built to fix.

Imagine a world that only lets you discover restaurants on Resy or OpenTable.

People don't find 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 piqued, they then 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. Vacation rentals never did. Stays is the missing layer." -Jeff Cremonte, Co-Founder of Stays

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

Stays is not trying to be another major booking platform (also called an 'online travel agency' or 'OTA' for short) like Airbnb, Vrbo, or Booking.com.

Likewise, it's not trying to be another niche booking website that simply aggregates any run-of-the-mill vacation rental that a property management software (PMS) will allow it to sync with.

Stays works alongside Airbnb, Vrbo, niche OTAs, and property management tools. We're a complementary 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.

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 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.

The industry solved 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:

• Building guest trust at scale and building market demand
• Expanding supply of properties available to rent
• Turning vacation rentals into a mainstream category outside of hotels

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 was no longer necessary for a simple, safe, and secure booking process.

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

Direct bookings usually have many of the 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 listed 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.

But the large OTA algorithms are not optimized around taste. They prioritize things like review volume and conversion rates. 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 disappears 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?

Favorite the stay for later. Join its waitlist. Get its latest Offers in your feed. 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?

Stays is now open to travelers. Create a free account and you get your own Traveler Portal, built around the stays you love. We're obsessed with building out the platform to provide nothing but utility, value, and joy to our audience of travel-lovers.

Here's a few things travelers 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.

Booking optionality and offers

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 offers and deals to inspire travelers to come stay with them at 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 of 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.

Here's what's inside the Traveler Portal today:

• A personal Feed: new Offers, Giveaways, photos, and updates from the stays you favorite and the regions you follow.
• Favorites & Trips: save the stays you love and group them into Trips for a specific getaway.
• Offers: deals straight from hosts, redeemed with the host when you book.
• Giveaways: hosts run free-stay Giveaways that you can enter with one click. No purchase necessary.
• Invites: a host can send you a private Invite with a special offer that isn't on their public listing. Through Invites, hosts see your first name at most.
• Stays AI: an assistant that searches the curated directory, compares your favorites, and surfaces current Offers. It even works inside Claude and ChatGPT.

All of that is free. Stays Premium is an optional membership ($6/mo or $49/yr) for travelers who want to see new Offers the minute they post, get more Giveaway entries per click, and receive unlimited Invites. Not sure if it's for you? Read Is Stays Premium Worth It?. New to Stays? Start with How Travelers Can Get the Most Out of Stays.

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.

Vacation rentals are real businesses

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.

Hosts on Stays can also see when travelers are interested in their stay (first name at most) and send those travelers a private Invite with a special offer. So the better Stays works for hosts, the more deals land in your Invites tab.

Where we are now

More than 3,000 travelers joined the Stays waitlist before launch, and the Traveler Portal is now open to everyone. We're onboarding our first cohort of hosts, 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. Create a free account and you'll see what we mean.

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