Hostie

- CASE OF STUDY -

Platform for Listing & Booking Accommodations

The ultimate solution, that simplifies every aspect  of your property management business!

What is Hostie

Hostie started as a vacation rental property manager and knows what it takes to deliver the perfect property. This is why all of Hostie properties go through verification before publishing them online. 

Hostie is also an online community for vacationers, what empowering people to plan the perfect getaway without the “what if’s”. No flat pillows, no complications with bookings…no surprises. Hostie is the best way to get away.

Hostie has high standards when it comes to vetting users, building safe community by ensuring all users have government-issued IDs. All users such as Home Owners, Cohosts, Real Estate Agents, Multi-Family Developers, and Vacation Rental Companies are vetted and hand picked by Hostie. 

Our market place creates a standard and Hostie makes it easy for Home Owners to connects them with the top 1% of cohosts in the world, in addition, connect them with Interior Designers, Trip Planners, Professional Housekeepers, Photographers, Content Writers, and Real Estate Agents. 

The application is done based on WP Rentals theme provided by Rentals Club, and integrated with powerful Channel Manager for Vacation Rentals.

The Project

Business situation

The Client (Anthony) came to us via our partners. He is a founder of Airpads, a vacation rental management company that takes the work out of vacation rentals for hosts and homeowners on Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, HomeAway and many other popular channels. The company based in Los Angeles, USA. 

They used another property management software before, and after a while they wanted to get independent and build their own solution. Thus WP Rentals theme provided by Rentals Club was bought, customized, integrated with powerful Channel Manager for Vacation Rentals - Rentals United (RU).

Before us, WordPress theme customization was started by another team of WP developers. They didn’t have any requirements specification documentation, just some high level features formulation, based on which they made an estimation which eventually appeared to be inaccurate.

Challenges

So the first team extremely needed to:

  • organize a development process, 
  • take over calls with Client, 
  • perform business analysis,
  • put additional resources for development of integration with RU, frontend development, and software testing.

Therefore Client has decided to join forces and unite 2 teams into the one, so we started to work together in order to achieve a common aim. Once system released, we keep working on developing new challenging features and integrations.

Work process

After uniting 2 teams and getting the one distributed team of developers in 2 different cities of Ukraine and the Client in different time zone in USA (10 hours difference with Ukraine), it was decided to work by Kanban methodology. We decided not to plan/commit/execute two week iterations but rather work in a continuous flow, pulling issues from the top of our to do list. Fully described by business analyst issues fell into the JIRA board twice a week after the call with the Client. Next day after the late call team could keep the work on raised tasks, business analyst could sleep till late, work keeps going smoothly. For work the Time and Material pricing model was chosen.

The Solution

Before proposing solution to the Client we analyzed the project needs from features and technology perspectives, estimated a ballpark number. After that, we sent a proposal that completely satisfied the Client's needs. Next, we carried out a whole complex of works on project management, business analysis, frontend, backend development and testing.

Now we:

  • work closely with our Client to keep improving the product
  • develop new features and integrations for the Hostie website
  • carry out consultations for the system support team

 

  • 1 Project Manager
  • 1 Business analyst
  • 3 Backend Developers
  • 1 Frontend Developer
  • 1 QA Engineer
  • 1 DevOps Engineer
Team

Technologies

  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • Linux
  • Apache/Nginx
  • Stripe API
  • Facebook API
  • jQuery
  • PHP + WordPress
  • Rentals United API
  • Google API
  • PayPal API
  • Authorize.Net

Goals Achieved

ResultsResults
Results
Results
  • WP Rentals plugin customization
  • Rentals United integration
  • WordPress plugins setting up
  • Properties and bookings manager
  • 4 subscription plans implementation
  • Invoices for different subscription plans
  • Operational Dashboard creation
  • Monthly Statements with total payout & owner revenue calculation
  • Inbox for cohosts creation
  • Import old bookings from RU to WP
  • Import existing properties from RU to WP

Hostie Features

Property Listing
Owners/cohosts list their properties on the platform with check-in/wifi instruction for guests. The added property are passed to RentalsUnited (description, images, availability dates, rates, etc.) to be listed on booking services.
Operational Dashboard
Owners/cohosts have quick access to monitor current and upcoming reservations, invoices, property occupancy & revenue by months, payments by guests & own revenue. Analyze large volumes of bookings to investigate trends, predict outcomes, and discover insights.
Booking
Guests search properties and make reservations. The booked property is passed to Rentals United and then is pushed to the channels. Hostie receives external bookings of the listed properties from connected channels via Rentals United.
Multi-Calendar
A complete view of all the reservations of owner’s properties from all of channels, in one place. Owners/cohost can also see the availability dates for each property on the calendar with prices for each day.
Channel Manager
Effortlessly distribute & control properties and bookings across all channels - including Airbnb, Booking.com and other channels.
Unified Inbox
Simple owner's inbox for guest communication. Multi-thread inbox for cohosts, seamlessly synced with your listing data and showing all messages from Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, HomeAway and other channels.
Mobile Friendly
A mobile-friendly website is no longer an option, it's a requirement. Owners/cohosts can run their business on-the-go, travelers can do instant bookings on the fly!
hostie page
hostie admin
hostie pricing
hostie dashboard
hostie page
hostie admin
hostie pricing
hostie dashboard
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