Mark Simpson discovered vacation rental websites were sending customers away to clunky third-party booking systems. He built a seamless on-site checkout instead, and when major PMS providers refused API access, he used his community to pressure them into opening up.
But in 2020, I realized that there was something very broken in our website booking process is that a future potential guest would land on one of our sites, just like they do on any other WordPress website that's not connected to a PMS. And when they come to hit the Book now button, they have to start their journey all over again. So they have to leave your WordPress website, go back to, let's say, Guesty's website, and they have to go through that whole process. So it's very broken. What I wanted to do is I wanted to make that booking process as smooth as Airbnb or booking.com or VRBO. And so we reached out to the biggest PMS partners, Hostaway, Guesty, Hostfleet, et cetera, and we asked if we could get access to their API. They all turned around and said no to me. So we just went ahead and built it anyway. And we used our members at the point of time to sort of force these PMS providers to pay attention to little old Boostly. So it was the power of the community that helped us get access to these APIs, and that's what really set us apart. And I think that's one of the reasons why our growth has been so huge these past few years.
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