The Direct Booking Secret Hosts Are Using to Bypass Airbnb

All right, welcome everybody. We're back for another episode and we've got one of our regulars, Mr. Arthur Culker of StayFi, with us. I really wanted to get him on because StayFi have been doing a lot behind the scenes, launching a lot of cool stuff, and there's a new website that we want to get everybody to go to. So Arthur, thank you very much for joining us. We're in May 2026. What's the latest in your world? What's been happening with StayFi? What have you been cooking behind the scenes?

Yeah, well, thanks for having me, Mark. Um, yeah, so we've been working on a bunch of new products and features over the last 6 months or a year. Um, but the main one that I'm super excited to talk about today, which anybody can go use either as a booker or a property manager or host, is a website called Stayfinder. So that's stayfinder.com. I'll explain kind of like what it is for guests. Bookers, and then I'll talk about how property managers can leverage it. But anyways, the idea for a booker or somebody looking to stay at a short-term rental is they can go to Stayfinder.com. They can search in their whatever areas they're looking for. And then what we do is we return every single listing that we can find in the world. It's not just limited to Stayfy customers or certain PMS. Every listing we can find in the world where we have a direct booking site. And then we compare the price on that direct booking site to the Airbnb price. So it's really a meta search similar to like Kayak or Agoda. So we're returning the universe of properties, all the prices, and then if somebody wants to book or look at a property, when they click on the direct booking price, we take them directly to that website, to that property with the date selected. So then you can see there how to actually book it with the short-term rental host or property manager. So we really want to make it easy for people looking to stay in short-term rentals to find direct booking sites, because that can be one of the hardest things when you're on Airbnb, trying to find the direct booking site for these different properties and whether it exists or not.

Let me see if I can share my screen. There we go. So I've got it up. I've got it up now. And we're in Nashville. So I'm looking for a place to go in Nashville in October. I'm coming over for the Vrma International. I'm in Stayfinder. I'm in Nashville. So talk to me what I'm looking at right now on the map and on the left.

Yeah, so on the left you can see these are all the different listings where we have matches. And so you can see the Airbnb price on the left and then a direct booking price and the savings for the total stay on the right. And so if you click on an individual property into it on the left, we actually, uh, well, if you click View Deal, we're going to take you directly to the property manager's website. Yeah, no, of course. The cool thing is for all of these listings we've created we take the Airbnb and Direct Booking listing and we feed it into an AI tool and we generate a net new listing. So this is definitely a product that could not have been made prior to these AI tools being popularly widespread, just because we need to generate net new listings for every single property that we can find in the entire world automatically. And then when you hit, uh, book now, it will take you to the Direct Booking website and when you hit Airbnb, it will obviously take you to the Airbnb website so that you can validate that this price that we're telling you is more expensive is actually more expensive. So we make it easy for people to do that. Nice.

And it just goes straight to the checkout page when I'm on the book direct button, it goes straight to the end. So for the guest experience, they don't have to restart the search at the start of the website. It just goes straight into where they can book and pay.

Depending on the website builder and the PMS, We take you as far down the process as we can. So it's, this is the ideal situation. Obviously not every PMS can support that, but we'll take the booker the furthest way down.

Yeah.

And then the reason why these are preferred partners, so they're listed first, is because they're paying Stayfy customers, um, that are also sharing data with us, which I can explain in a second. So the idea is we'll display every result. But we want to preference obviously our StayFi customers first. But if you scroll down, you'll eventually find non-StayFi customer listings as well as other property managers that are not our customer. Nice. Yeah, so, and then the way we're driving traffic to this site is if you are a preferred partner, so that's what that blue thing means on the left. When a guest logs into the Wi-Fi at those properties, the guests are opting into two different email lists if they choose to. They're opting into the property manager's email marketing and to Stayfinder email marketing. And so what we've been doing is email marketing everybody across all of these properties to come and check out and search for listings here. So we're getting about 40,000 to 50,000 new emails every single month from all of our customers into this joint marketing database. And the idea is if you're a Stayfy customer, now instead of just marketing to your own audience, which is obviously very important, we're going to be marketing your properties to guests across all of our customers. So we're really trying to solve the issue of how do we get you net new discovery from people that haven't stayed with you before? Because obviously that's the hardest challenge, right? Yeah. It's easiest thing to do is to convince somebody. Who wants to return to come and book with you again, as long as they've had a great experience, especially if they can save money. It's much harder, especially if you're a smaller property manager, haven't made a ton of investments into direct booking, don't really have the budget to do search engine marketing. How are you going to get net new people to discover your brand? And we're really trying to solve that problem for people.

That'll be awesome in like 3, 6, 12 months' time to see like some of the results that you can come back with and sort of go, well, this is like the impact that we've having by doing that, which is, uh, Which is epic. And yeah, you're 100% right. When you're going to a new city or a new town and you've never been there before, you always just sort of revert to what you know, which is probably going to be Airbnb, Booking.com, or Vrbo. If somebody's going— sorry, go on.

Yeah, on Stayfinder.com, you'll also find a link to our Chrome extension. And so the Chrome extension will actually show you the direct booking price on the Airbnb website for those listings. So if you want to go to Airbnb and do your traditional search and find the properties you want there, then for any of them where we find a Direct Booking match, we'll actually— the Direct Booking price will load on Airbnb.com and you can click there and then go to the website to save. Right now, most of our matches are in the United States. So over the next 3 months, we're going to be expanding internationally to provide as many matches as we can around the world. And then obviously our matching algorithm is improving over time. So right now we've matched like 5 to 10% of Airbnb inventory. And then over time, that's going to grow more and more. So you'll see more matches on the Airbnb website. But obviously there's also a huge portion of Airbnb inventory. And then in the future, we'll add Vrbo and Booking where there is no direct booking website, right? So that's why it's important that we keep evangelizing, launching a direct booking site because people are just missing out on the opportunity to drive some bookings directly if they don't have a website, right?

Yeah. So obviously we want as many people as possible to come to Stayfy and sign up to Stayfy. But if they're like, okay, I like the idea of Stayfinder, but I'm not quite yet ready to join Stayfy, can they still go to stayfinder.com and create an account today?

Yeah. So right now we don't have a separate signup flow for Stayfinder, but when you sign up for Stayfy, you can just decline any of our paid services. And then you can create a free account, go into Stayfy, go to the Stayfinder tab. And on the Stayfinder tab, you'll be able to validate one, that we have all your properties already or not. So when you connect your PMS, we'll basically look and see, have we found your properties out in the world to create matches? And then you can basically claim them. But we may not have found them yet. Or maybe we found the Airbnb listings, but we didn't find your direct booking website, right? So you can basically go into Stayfinder, section of Stayfy and then validate the Airbnb link and the direct booking link for all of your listings. And if they don't exist yet, it will create them. Also, if you're not in the US, we can then create them for the non-US destinations now, and you'll basically be the only people in the search results right now until we add more listings there.

Get first mover advantage.

And the nice thing with those is when you saw on the results, there's like that preferred, uh, like little tag, your listings will then become verified and your listings will still rank and search behind obviously Stayfy customers, but you'll be ahead of all the random other matches we found out in the wild. So if you do verify, you will appear higher in the search results than you would be if you were not otherwise verified. So it's definitely still worth doing even if you don't plan on becoming a Stayfy paying customer.

So it's a good opportunity now to talk about Stayfy. We've got hundreds of Boostly members that use Stayfy. You must have thousands of customers all over the world. For anybody who is watching this who is new into the industry and they don't really understand what actually Stayfy is, can you give like a quick elevator pitch of what you provide to the industry?

Yeah, I mean, I kind of jumped into this assuming somebody knew what Stayfy did when explaining Stayfinder. But if you're not familiar, what we're most known for at Stayfy is what I consider the best way to collect guest data. We provide in short-term rentals the same Wi-Fi login experience that you would have seen at a coffee shop or an airport or hotel where every single guest, not just the booker, and that's obviously the key part, has to provide their name, email, phone number if you'd like, in order to get onto the Wi-Fi. So basically the guest joins the network, this captive portal or splash page will load automatically on their device. At this point, you can also introduce your branding, say like, hey, we are Boostly Homes, not Airbnb. The guest has to provide their data, they can opt in, and then those emails that we collect can either go to our own email marketing tool, which we also have at Stayfy, or you can send it to any other email marketing tool like Boostly's email marketing tool. If you use an email marketing agency, if you use Mailchimp, we can just send the data automatically to wherever you'd like to market from.

Yeah, and it is like synonymous. So you think of any email guest collection tool in the industry and everybody talks about StayFi. I know we've got a lot of people who do use your services, and like I say, a lot of people are using it. What's new then? So we've been doing— we must have 5 or 6 times we've had you on the podcast over the years. But what's happening right now? What's the 2026 plans for StayFi?

Yeah, so one of the big things we've been working on is on the hardware side, because in order to use captive Wi-Fi or have a splash page, you need certain types of Wi-Fi hardware. In your property. And the biggest objection or reason why people don't start with StayFi is because of the cost of the hardware. So we've been laser-focused in the last year to find lower-cost options to implement hardware, whether you're in the US or overseas. And so the first thing we launched last year was called StayFi Express. StayFi Express is not a new Wi-Fi device. It's like a little black box that costs less than $100. And what that does is you can connect it to a lot of common, we call them like consumer Wi-Fi systems, things like Amazon Eros, TP-Link Decos, Asus routers. It's not every router, but it's a lot of very common routers that are in short-term rental homes or just homes in general that will basically add the captive portal to your existing Wi-Fi network. So instead of before, you would have to pay like $200, $300, $400, $500 to get Stayfy set up in a property. Now you can pay sub-$100 to get Stayfy Express, and we do ship that device anywhere in the world.

Yeah. And then, um, so I was just going to say, I was speaking to somebody literally last week in London at a conference, and they've got 400 properties in, in Dubai, and the misconception they had was that they had to use Stayfy for all 400 properties at once. And I was like, no, you can literally get started with a few, vibe with them, make sure that you like the company, and then over time you can upgrade and, and, and, and go throughout. Like, do you find that that is a misconception if someone's got more than, like, say, 1 or 2 properties with your brand?

For sure. I think the thing, especially when you have a lot of customers in Dubai, a lot of them operate like a lot of like 1-bedroom condos where there's 2 guests typically. Honestly, that may not make financial sense because you're going to collect 2 emails per stay. Maybe you're already collecting 1 if you're collecting the bookers. But then they also operate villas or larger properties that sleep 10, 12, 15 people. Yeah, obviously that's going to be big, bigger bang for your buck. So there's no requirement in Stayfy to do your whole portfolio. We have a lot of people that are just focused on their larger properties or properties that sleep a certain number of people just because they know, one, typically the nightly rate for those stays is much higher. So those guests are also one, more valuable from like a rebooking standpoint. So they're going to book your high value properties. And two, obviously you're going to collect a lot more data in those homes through the Wi-Fi. So there's a lot of people that are just focused on certain parts of their portfolio, which we're totally fine with, right? However you want to use it makes sense to us. And then, yeah, and then we did launch this year, we launched a new line of hardware that we sell called Agilent, which is for people that don't have compatible existing hardware. And it's just like 20 or 30% cheaper than the UniFi hardware we were finding selling before, especially in large homes. So just trying to make it easier for folks to get started with Wi-Fi marketing with lower upfront costs.

Yeah. And like we've spoken about this many times, but email marketing is the best form of marketing in my opinion. Like it has, is, and will ever be because You know, when you put a post out on social media, whether it's Instagram or TikTok or Facebook, wherever, you're like, you haven't got a clue who is going to be A, seeing it, or B, engaging with it. But with email, like I say, you know exactly who's getting those emails. You can see who opens them and who clicks links. And, and like the way that these CRM tools are set up now, like we use GoHighLevel at Boostly, it is amazing what you can do with this technology and hosts. You know, who are just getting into this are able to, you know, within a few clicks get going and I see massive wins from it. I know somebody that uses Stayfy and, uh, they came to us and they had just shy of 1,000 emails in their inbox and they'd never ever sent an email before. They literally used a couple of emails and they had bookings on the back of it just from one email blast out. So, you know, if you're not using Stayfy, if you're not collecting data, just go ahead and start because it will benefit you. Maybe not in a month, 6 months, 12 months, and definitely like in a couple of years time.

Yeah, I would say that is the biggest issue we see from Stayfy customers is not starting to regularly market to their guests. And whether that's even setting up an automation or sending a monthly newsletter, email is still the lowest cost form of marketing, like per impression by a ton. And also you're dealing with a very warm audience. And all these other kind of forms of marketing can be very important to like buttress what you're doing with email, whether it's social, blogs, SEO. But you really need to first work on that warm audience because if you can't get the warm audience to convert and book you directly, imagine how much harder it's going to be to get somebody who's never stayed with you or heard of you to book with you, right? And overcome all those additional trust barriers, which is why they're going to Airbnb in the first place.

Yeah, 100%. So I love what you're doing for the industry. Stayfinder, I'm, I'm a, you know, I'm a fan. I've got the, the Chrome extension literally on my, on my, uh, browser that I use. Funny enough, I use Comet now by Perplexity, but obviously they use a Chromium type service, but I've got it on there. So I'm excited to see what happens this year with it. I'm excited to see what the results are, and especially seeing that you are actively driving people to it as well. Like you said, thousands of email addresses that you are collecting.

Every month we've been doubling the traffic we're sending to direct booking websites. The next thing that's coming down the line is integrating with direct booking websites, either from the PMS or from third-party, obviously, website builders to then actually report back on the bookings. So that's obviously very important to understand who's actually making a booking or not. So that's like the next very important part of the picture that we'll be adding. Like in the next quarter is making sure that we can actually attribute all the bookings back to Stayfinder. And that's going to be a— that's not an easy thing to do because you have to integrate with every website and every PMS website builder as well. But that's kind of the process we're kicking off next, which then can really validate that we're not just sending traffic, but we're being successful.

Yeah, well, good luck. I know there's a lot of Boostly people who are using your service and we keep sending people your way and we're excited to see what we can do next and connect and see how we can help in any way, shape or form. So I So do keep us up to date. And obviously, if you are watching this and if you've never been on the StayFi website, it's stayfi.com. And then Stay Finder is stayfinder.com. Pretty simple to go and check out. Alpha, thank you very much. I know you're a man who likes to travel. What's your future travel plans on the horizon? Are you bunkering down in New York for a while?

I am going to be going on a trip with my parents in France. This June. So I will be hitting up the European continent, but that's really the only thing I have so far for the summer, which seems a little depressing for me, but we'll see what happens.

Whenever I open up Instagram, you are somewhere else around the world. So to see you bunkering down for a little bit, it'll be a little more heads down lately. Shock to the system, but all good, right? Fantastic. Thank you very much for joining us. And everybody, please go and show Alpha some love in the chat and obviously on the StayFi as well. Thank you very much, buddy.

Thanks.