CraftedStays

CraftedStays Fifteen to twenty cents of every dollar. That's what OTAs keep from operators who don't own their booking channel.
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CraftedStays gives you the infrastructure to take it back, powered by Aria, our AI that gets your properties found on ChatGPT and Google.

Search your property name in Google, then read page one the way a guest would.Five things to look at: who owns the first...
10/04/2026

Search your property name in Google, then read page one the way a guest would.

Five things to look at: who owns the first result, the title and description under your link, the panel beside it if there is one, the star rating Google shows, and what an AI says when you ask it about your property.

Anything wrong in any of those is what a guest sees before they reach your website. It takes five minutes.

Each check is in the slides.

10/02/2026

In one sentence, here's what it means for a rental site to be AI ready.

Make sure the crawlers can actually read the content on your page, and make sure that content answers the questions people are asking.

That's it. Not a checklist of hacks. Not a plugin. Content that's readable by AI tools, and content that actually answers real guest questions.

Most sites fail one or both of these. Fix that, and you're already ahead of most of the operators still guessing at this.

10/01/2026

A beautiful vacation rental website can still generate very few direct bookings.⁣
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Because design isn’t always the problem.⁣
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A lot of short term rental websites are built like digital brochures:⁣
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Beautiful property photos.⁣
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Availability calendar.⁣
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About page.⁣
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Booking button.⁣
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But a direct booking website should function more like an ecommerce store.⁣
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Every section should have a job.⁣
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Build trust.⁣
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Answer a guest’s questions.⁣
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Handle objections.⁣
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Help them compare options.⁣
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And move them from browsing toward booking.⁣
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If traffic is reaching your website but direct bookings are flat, another redesign might not be the answer.⁣
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Look at the booking journey and conversion structure instead.⁣
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Because the goal isn’t simply to build a vacation rental website guests enjoy looking at.⁣
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It’s to build one that helps them confidently book direct.⁣
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strmarketing vacationrentals craftedstays

When a guest books through an OTA, you get a name and a checkout date. That is it.No email. No preferences. No booking h...
10/01/2026

When a guest books through an OTA, you get a name and a checkout date. That is it.

No email. No preferences. No booking history. No way to reach them again without paying the platform a second time.

When a guest books directly, you own that relationship. Their email, their trip preferences, what they booked and when, all of it becomes data you can use to bring them back.

That is the actual asset. Not the booking itself, the relationship behind it.

Operators who treat guest data as infrastructure, not an afterthought, are the ones building repeat bookings and referral revenue without paying OTA fees twice.

Your direct booking site should be capturing that data by default. If it is not, you are leaving your most valuable asset on the table.

craftedstays.co

09/30/2026

What if a guest complaint wasn’t just a problem to solve?

In short term rental hospitality, issues are inevitable.

Something breaks.

Expectations don’t match.

A guest gets frustrated.

Most operators focus on resolving the issue as quickly as possible.

But there’s another opportunity:

Use the conflict to build a deeper relationship with the guest.

Listen.

Understand what actually went wrong.

Make the guest feel heard.

Then solve the problem with care.

Handled well, a difficult moment can become part of the reason a guest trusts your brand.

And that trust can lead to better reviews, stronger guest relationships, repeat stays, and ultimately more direct bookings.

Great hospitality isn’t about never having problems.

It’s about what guests remember about how you handled them.

strmarketing craftedstays vacationrentals propertymanagement

09/30/2026

A national property management company with 30,000 doors got skipped by AI search. A small owner with just a few pages got picked.

Here's why. Traditional SEO rewards authority, backlinks, and scale. AEO and GEO reward something different: answering specific questions really well.

A smaller portfolio can niche down and build genuinely thorough pages around a specific guest avatar. A company with 30,000 doors isn't going that deep on any single niche.

If you understand exactly who your guest is and build content that actually answers their questions, you can surpass companies far bigger than you. Scale stopped being the advantage. Specificity is.

Three things worth checking on your booking site this week. Takes ten minutes.1. Open one property page on your phone. C...
09/29/2026

Three things worth checking on your booking site this week. Takes ten minutes.

1. Open one property page on your phone. Count how long it takes to show the first photo.
2. Check whether that page has its own meta description, or whether it's blank.
3. Read the first paragraph. Does it say who the place is for, or only what's in it?

If any of those made you wince, bring the URL to Booth 640 at VRMA next week. We'll run the full scan with you.

SEO, AEO, GEO. I keep seeing these three thrown around like they're interchangeable, and honestly it took me a while to ...
09/29/2026

SEO, AEO, GEO. I keep seeing these three thrown around like they're interchangeable, and honestly it took me a while to get clear on the difference myself.

Here's the short version: SEO is showing up when someone searches. AEO is actually answering the specific question a guest is asking. GEO is what ChatGPT and Perplexity pull from when someone's planning a trip.

The mistake is treating them like competing strategies. They're not. GEO builds on AEO, AEO builds on SEO. Same foundation, just showing up in more places now.

If you're wondering where to start: structure and specificity on your site serve all three at once. That's been the approach with CraftedStays from day one.

Save this for the next time someone throws these acronyms at you.

Coming to VRMA? Come say hi to Gil at Booth 640.And while you’re there, let us take a look at your direct booking websit...
09/29/2026

Coming to VRMA? Come say hi to Gil at Booth 640.

And while you’re there, let us take a look at your direct booking website.

We’re offering a FREE site scan to help uncover opportunities across your website, SEO, AI search visibility, and direct booking experience.

Send us your URL before the event and we’ll take a look.

Register for your free site scan here:

forms.gle/CogJoR5E6GfGzTbe6

See you at VRMA, Booth 640.

09/28/2026

Most operators think a direct booking site is just a place guests land after seeing your Airbnb listing.

That's not a funnel. That's a dead end.

A real direct booking funnel starts with discovery, moves through trust-building, and ends with a frictionless checkout that captures guest data you actually own.

Here's what that looks like on a CraftedStays site:

Guest finds you through organic search or a direct link. They land on a property page built for conversion, not just display. They book through a checkout flow that's optimized for completion. You capture their email, their preferences, and their booking history.

Now you can market to them directly. No OTA in the middle. No 15% cut on the rebooking.

That's what owning your demand actually means.

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Los Angeles, CA

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