Modern Vacation Rental Booking Widgets for Direct Reservations
- Divyanshu Rawat
- 8 minutes ago
- 6 min read
What's the best vacation rental booking widget for short-term rentals? With many popular solutions developed for hosts of short-term rental properties, choosing one may seem daunting.
From a varied set of features to advanced customization and multiple integrations, modern vacation rental platforms offer many benefits to STR business owners. In this post, we'll take a look at some of these solutions to help you choose a booking widget that fits your ideas and needs.
Top 7 Vacation Rental Booking Widget Solutions
Managing a short-term rental property requires dealing with multiple tasks daily. Customizable booking widgets and property management platforms that they are part of can easily automate the reservation workflow, making booking vacation rentals smoother for your guests.
Here are the 7 best solutions that offer booking widgets you may want to consider first before selecting an actual solution or STR booking software for your property.
1 - BNBForms
One of the first platforms offering a vacation rental booking widget is BNBForms. This platform offers an efficient set of tools for direct booking management, including a channel manager, integration with popular payment gateways, and a step-by-step booking widget.
The widget is fully configurable and can be integrated into any website or CMS. Aside from these features, BNBForms also allows for managing accommodation types and setting dynamic pricing options to automate key aspects of property management.
The platform provides an incredibly flexible widget that can be integrated into any platform or website. From WordPress and Wix to HTML and Joomla, you can connect any online presence to this reliable booking engine with a step-by-step reservation form.
Moreover, you can freely customize the default form fields to suit your needs and expectations of your guests.
Key features:
Simple yet powerful direct booking engine;
Easy-to-integrate booking widget;
Built-in analytics and reporting;
Support for invoices, taxes, and fees;
Customizable booking rules.
Name | Developer | Price | Free trial |
BNBForms | BNBForms | $16/mo | 1 month |
2 - Lodgify
Lodgify is one of the most widely known property management systems that is highly popular among many vacation rental hosts. From an integrated website builder to property management software, this platform provides lots of benefits for any kind of property hosts. It also delivers a configurable direct booking widget, which can be embedded into your website in a few clicks.
The platform's widget allows you to choose between a booking box and a search box to provide what your customers are looking for. Compatible with CMS such as Weebly, WordPress, and Squarespace, this vacation rental booking widget allows for showcasing your properties regardless of your site’s design.
The widget also allows you to add maps to show the exact property location alongside supporting secure payments via Apple Pay and Google Pay.
Key features:
Reservation system with guest management;
Unified inbox;
Website templates for direct booking;
Flexible online hotel booking widget for website.
Dedicated mobile app.
Name | Developer | Price | Free trial |
Lodgify | From $16/mo (+1.9% booking fee) | 1 week |
3 - Guesty
Next on our list of vacation rental booking widget solutions is Guesty. As a multifunctional tool for short-term rentals of any size, this platform allows automating core tasks that STR hosts face daily. Moreover, it is equipped with a hotel booking widget for the website.
By embedding it on your website on WordPress, Wix, or any other CMS, you can encourage direct bookings and eliminate unwanted distribution fees.
Similar to the abovementioned solutions, Guesty also has an embeddable widget aimed at smooth integration of booking functionality. By simply using the built-in customization tools, you can integrate this widget into any platform just by copying a code snippet.
This way, you get to display a well-designed accommodation search form with all properties that your booking engine manages. Note that Guesty doesn’t provide customer support for embeddable widgets.
Key features:
Multicalendar for booking synchronization;
Guesty AI suite for vacation rental automation;
Revenue & task management tools;
Mobile app for guests;
Multiple add-ons for extending default functionality.
Name | Developer | Price | Free trial |
Guesty | Guesty, Inc. | From $27/mo | 2 weeks |
4 - Hospitable
Hospitable is another widely used and reliable property management platform for owners of vacation rentals. Packed with features designed for automated guest communication and centralized reservations, this solution also delivers a flexible hotel booking widget. Having a built-in availability calendar and being easy to integrate, it can be used for your hotel website to make it more accessible to any potential guest.
The platform's widget supports many popular builders and content management systems, such as Squarespace or WordPress. Unfortunately, this hotel booking widget for the website isn't compatible with Google Sites yet.
Hospitable offers several widgets that you can use for a self-hosted website, such as location and property search. Besides, it is possible to customize the look of a widget by editing the color scheme to make sure the best booking widget for hotel websites matches your site's brand.
Key features:
Direct booking website;
Task management;
Smart lock integrations;
AI assistant;
Guest & owner portals.
Name | Developer | Price | Free trial |
Hospitable | Hospitable R&D BV | From $29/mo per property | 2 weeks |
5 - Little Hotelier
As one of the highly useful and reliable solutions for managing vacation rentals, Little Hotelier delivers a complete suite of tools for vacation rental managers. It also includes a vacation rental booking widget that allows you to integrate the platform's booking engine with CMS like WordPress. Among other notable features, the software provides a dedicated website builder, detailed analytics, and guest engagement tools, to name a few.
As for the hotel booking widget, Little Hotelier doesn’t provide a simple way to integrate it into an external website. Instead, the platform offers you to build a website with available tools. Still, it doesn’t mean you can’t use this booking engine with your own website. Thanks to free widgets from third-party developers, you can use the property identifiers of Little Hotelier to add a property search to your website.
Key features:
Direct booking engine;
Digital guest directory;
Metasearch for easier accommodation marketing
Partner program for hosts;
Detailed reporting.
Name | Developer | Price | Free trial |
Little Hotelier | SiteMinder Limited | From 119€/mo | Available |
6 - OwnerRez
OwnerRez is one more highly useful booking management platform that provides its own direct booking widget. Covering the varied needs of STR property hosts, the platform helps with channel management, building a website for your vacation rentals, accounting, and more. It also delivers a range of widgets, allowing you to show availability calendars, enable property search on your website, and display proper booking rates.
Compared to the other mentioned platforms, OwnerRez provides the widest range of vacation rental booking widgets that you can integrate. For example, you can add reviews, accommodation rates, and multiple calendar instances to your online presence. The booking management platform also supports the must-have direct booking widget, such as availability search and a reservation form.
Key features:
Property & channel management tools;
CRM & automated messaging;
Rezzy AI for better communication and task management;
Multiple integrations.
Name | Developer | Price | Free trial |
OwnerRez | OwnerRez, Inc. | From $40/mo per property | 2 weeks |
7- Hostaway
If you're looking for a reliable alternative to popular STR management platforms, we recommend exploring Hostaway. Being a popular solution for all kinds of hosts, it combines a property management system with an AI-powered unified inbox, secure payment processing, and marketing tools.
Additionally, the platform offers an easy-to-use vacation rental booking widget, which you can apply to provide a user-friendly accommodation search or availability calendar on your short-term rental website.
As a fully-featured booking management platform, Hostaway makes it really simple for you to integrate its hotel booking widgets into your website. Two main widgets are provided - the property search bar and the availability calendar. By using embeddable code, adding these solutions can be done easily, even if you don't have advanced coding knowledge.
What's more important, you can easily edit the provided widget code to customize its look.
Key features:
PMS with a performance dashboard;
Unified inbox with automated messaging;
Booking website builder;
Payment processing & guest invoicing;
Financial reporting and expense tracking.
Name | Developer | Price | Free trial |
Hostaway | Hostaway | Quote-based | None |
Conclusion
We hope this overview of popular vacation rental booking widget options and related property management platforms helped you choose something fitting your needs and expectations. Whether you need a simple yet effective step-by-step booking wizard or something more complex and reliable, any of the mentioned solutions can help. Besides, with any of the mentioned tools, you get some extra advantages for your vacation rental property:
Direct bookings:Â By using vacation rental management software and its widgets, you can reduce reliance on online travel agencies like Vrbo or Airbnb and save on various commission fees;
Seamless integration:Â When working with your website, you can easily integrate booking functionality using a widget and connect the website or CMS to your PMS for easier calendar syncing and reservation management.
Customization:Â If you want the widget to match your STR brand's look and feel, we recommend choosing a solution that supports customization. You'll be able to establish a unique and memorable booking experience for your customers with this approach.
Payment processing:Â One more significant benefit that the best booking widget for hotel websites provides is connected with secure payment gateways. By supporting services such as Stripe and PayPal, the widgets and property management systems allow your potential guests to instantly and securely pay for their reservation in a few simple steps.