April 2023 Update
As the first quarter of the year comes to a close, our sights are now firmly set on the strategic initiatives and milestones we’ve targeted over the next three months and beyond. Read our April update to learn about the latest features added to Dtravel Direct and what is coming next!
As the first quarter of the year comes to a close, our sights are now firmly set on the strategic initiatives and milestones we’ve targeted over the next three months and beyond. Now that we’ve laid the foundational work of empowering property managers to create premium direct booking websites and have property managers actively using these to scale their direct booking businesses, it’s more important than ever to continue lowering the barrier to entry so that anyone who wants to start and grow their direct booking business can do so. At the same time, as we’re building this capability, we’re continuing to add improvements to our direct booking product, which we’ll detail below.
Recent Updates in April
- Monthly Stats
- Book Now Pay Later (BNPL)
- New Custom Sites
- Booking Widget
- Manual Reservations
- New Channel Manager
Monthly Stats
An overview of our month-over-month (MoM), March to April, short-term rental merchant statistics for Dtravel Direct:
New Merchant Signups (Short-term rental operator sign ups): -15.42%
New Active Listings (Number of new bookable listings): -12.50%
New Reservations (Dtravel Direct booking engine usage): +11.76%
Crypto Enabled Listings (Merchants offering crypto payments): 90%
Book Now Pay Later (BNPL)
We’re constantly optimizing the Dtravel Direct booking engine for conversion. The latest update sets us further apart from competitors with another feature intended to help hospitality operators drive more bookings.
Previously, operators using Dtravel Direct were only able to offer guests smart contract powered crypto payments and credit card payments through Stripe, Google Pay and Apple Pay. With our latest update, operators can now enable a book-now-pay-later (BNPL) service from Stripe, with Affirm, Afterpay, Clearpay and Klarna as options, depending on the country and currency supported. This means guests will now be able to book a property in installments over a specified duration of time. On average, offering a BNPL payment option tends to increase guest conversion by 20%.
Any operator who chooses to enable BNPL will be paid immediately, while guests pay either nothing or a portion of the total at purchase time depending on the BNPL provider’s terms and conditions.
You can increase your conversion rate by adding BNPL to your direct booking site through the Dtravel Direct dashboard settings. Learn more here.
New Custom Sites
As many of you know, we’ve been working with established vacation rental brands to build custom designs that help increase booking conversion. A number of these sites are starting to roll-out with many of the updates getting pushed to our core Dtravel Direct product for any property manager to access. In the future, we’ll have a number of templates for property managers to choose from.
Based out of Oklahoma, Howell Family Homes, features a beautiful collection of short-term rentals and also offers comprehensive property management services.
Howell Family Homes
HireSicily
Booking Widget
We’re currently working on a new way for vacation rental brands and property managers to add Dtravel Direct to their existing tech stack, regardless of what platform they’re using to power their website (e.g. Wordpress, SquareSpace etc).
Our engineering team has developed a demo version of a Dtravel Direct booking widget which can be added to vacation rental sites, enabling property managers to take advantage of the Dtravel Direct booking engine without rebuilding their existing site or creating a new one.
We’ll be iterating on different versions of this booking widget with an aim to increase accessibility to Dtravel Direct regardless of an operator’s existing tech stack.
Custom Reservations
We’ve received a significant amount of positive feedback from operators using our Custom Reservations feature (previously called Manual Reservations). One of our earliest adopters requested the ability to put a reservation on hold when creating a Custom Reservation. Based on this feedback, we’ve updated this feature, making it even easier for property managers to send custom quotes to guests.
Any operator creating a Custom Reservation can now do so while putting their availability on hold for a specified period of time and date.
For more information on Custom Reservations, please see our February update.
New Channel Manager Integration
We completed the initial phase of our first channel manager integration, which will allow more property managers to use Dtravel Direct. This included building toward the API to enable property, description, images, house rules, and cancellation policy synchronization as well as calendar availability and pricing system. To finalize the integration, we need to complete user onboarding flow, create-booking API, and cancellation API.
To ensure a smooth rollout, we’ll be beta testing this channel manager integration with a few of our earliest adopters. Official announcement coming soon.
What’s Next
- New Dtravel marketing site
- Dtravel Direct dashboard updates to significantly improve UI and UX for operators
- New homepage design for anyone powering their site with Dtravel Direct
- New customization features (add pages, host other content, FAQ, blog, and more)
- Dtravel Direct insurance options, providing up to $5M of protection per booking
- Free Guest Screenings for all Dtravel powered bookings
- Important partnership announcement with a leading web3 property manager coming soon
Complimentary Consultation
To help you get started with setting up a Dtravel powered direct booking site and advertising your site, we’re providing vacation rental businesses white glove onboarding support..
Contact us for a FREE marketing consultation to learn how you can grow your direct bookings.