Frequently Asked Questions

OpenSty is a tool that helps accommodation owners create their own booking page, share it with guests, and receive direct booking requests — without paying commissions to platforms like Booking.com or Airbnb. You get a professional page for your property with photos, pricing, availability calendar, and a booking form. Guests can request a reservation directly through your page.

Not at all. OpenSty is designed for property owners, not developers. You simply create an account, add your property details (photos, description, pricing), and your booking page is ready to share. No coding, no website building — everything is handled for you.

You share the link yourself. You can post it on your social media profiles, add it to local tourism listings, include it in your email signature, print it on business cards, or send it directly to returning guests. OpenSty is not a marketplace — it's your own booking page that you promote however you like.

Not by default. When a guest submits a booking request, you receive it via email and in your dashboard, and you arrange payment directly with the guest however you prefer (bank transfer, cash on arrival, etc.). If you'd like to take cards, connect your own Stripe account and turn on card payments for the property. The guest's card is authorised with the request, charged when you confirm and released if you decline. You are the merchant and the money goes to your Stripe account. OpenSty takes no fee and never holds it; Stripe charges its usual processing fees. The only payment OpenSty itself collects is your monthly subscription fee.

Yes. Choose a site address in your settings and you get one page for all your published properties, with a date search that shows what's free. On the Pro and Agency plans you can show that site on a domain you own. Each property keeps its own page too.

You receive an email notification and the request appears in your dashboard. You can review the guest's details (name, dates, number of guests, message) and then confirm or decline the request. The guest is notified of your decision by email.

No. All booking requests require your manual confirmation. You always have full control over who stays at your property and when. This protects you from unwanted bookings and gives you the chance to communicate with guests before confirming.

Guests receive a cancellation link in their booking confirmation email. They can cancel directly through that link, and you'll be notified. You can also decline or cancel bookings from your dashboard at any time. If the guest paid by card, the refund follows the cancellation terms they booked under and goes back through Stripe. Otherwise, any refund arrangements are handled directly between you and the guest.

Yes. You can set availability periods for your property and mark specific date ranges as unavailable. This is useful for blocking dates when you have bookings from other platforms, personal use, or maintenance periods. Confirmed bookings automatically block the corresponding dates on your calendar.

OpenSty automatically syncs with Airbnb, Booking.com, VRBO, and any platform that provides an iCal calendar link. Bookings from other platforms are imported every 15 minutes and automatically block your OpenSty calendar. You can also export your OpenSty bookings to other platforms. This two-way sync ensures you never get double-booked across different channels.

Yes, if you connect your own Stripe account and turn on the deposit hold for the property. The amount is held on the guest's card, not charged, and released automatically 1 to 3 days after check-out, as you choose, unless you make a claim. Banks only keep a hold open for a few days, so on a long stay it starts towards the end of the stay rather than at booking. Guests who paid by bank transfer add a card through a link.

You get an email and an alert in the dashboard, once per outage. A feed counts as broken after 3 failed syncs in a row, when it has had no good sync for 6 hours, or when it suddenly comes back empty while it had future stays. In that last case the dates stay blocked until you release them.

Yes. For each property you can write a message for before arrival, one for before checkout and a note for the thank-you email, and choose how many days ahead they go out. They go to confirmed guests only, and you can translate them with AI and send yourself a test first. Offers are separate: they go only to guests who ticked the offers box, and at most one a week.

A weekly check of each published property. It looks at the coming weeks of your calendar, your prices, page views and requests, and suggests concrete ways to fill open dates: allowing a shorter stay for a gap between two bookings, lowering the price of nights that start soon, or a discount code that only works for certain nights, to share with past guests. You find the ideas in the Grow tab of your dashboard and in a short email on Mondays. The booking coach is included in every plan.

No. Nothing changes until you tap Apply on a suggestion, and you can dismiss any of them. Applying one makes the same change you could make yourself: a price for certain days in your calendar, a short season with a shorter minimum stay, or a discount code. You can change any of it afterwards in your calendar and pricing settings. In the coach settings you set your lowest nightly price, your largest discount and the shortest stay you accept. Suggestions always stay inside those limits.

Only your own property's data: your calendar (including stays imported from Airbnb and Booking.com), your prices, page views and booking requests. It never uses other hosts' prices. OpenSty itself works out the dates and numbers. An AI model (Claude, by Anthropic) then picks the ideas that matter most and writes the explanation and a message you can share. It receives your property's title, location and those numbers, never your guests' names or contact details.

OpenSty offers three plans: - Solo (€14/month) — 1 property listing - Pro (€29/month) — up to 5 property listings - Agency (€99/month) — up to 50 listings + team member access All plans include unlimited booking requests, email notifications, and a custom booking page. There are no commissions or hidden fees.

You can create an account and set up your property for free. You'll need to subscribe to a plan to publish your booking page and start receiving booking requests from guests.

Yes. You can cancel your subscription at any time from Settings in your dashboard or through the Stripe billing portal. Your access continues until the end of your current billing period. After that, your property listings will be unpublished but your data remains intact in case you resubscribe.

We accept all major credit and debit cards through our payment partner Stripe. This includes Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and others depending on your region.

Yes. Connect a domain you own to any property from its editor, on every plan. You buy the domain yourself and add a few DNS records, and your opensty.com address keeps working.

Yes. We take data protection seriously. Your data is stored securely on Supabase (database) with encryption in transit. Wherever you live, you can request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal data at any time; our privacy policy covers the GDPR, UK GDPR, California and Canadian rules. Analytics cookies are only loaded after you give consent. You can delete your account and all associated data from your dashboard settings.

Yes, if you're on the Agency plan. You can invite team members by email. They'll get their own login and can help manage properties and booking requests. You control their access and can remove them at any time.