What is a Kaizen Blitz?

a focused, time-limited (usually one week or less) process improvement exercise where a team works to quickly identify and implement changes in a specific area

If I create a website, will I get direct bookings? No.

You could have a beautiful, expensive, professional looking website or a free/cheap one…even a bad looking site could outperform a beautiful, new, expensive, modern looking site.

Why?

What’s most important is having a direct booking strategy that drives traffic and interest in booking your listing.

Why is it that I still have the urge to invest thousands of dollars and months of time into a better looking direct booking website?

Because it does feel good to have a polished site, but this is usually for our own Host gratification.

If you want a custom site, we have great partners in our app marketplace. Get the hospitable template sites up now and follow this playbook and in parallel build a custom site

Can I build my own custom site using AI?

Yes. many hosts have done this using our MCP server and Direct Booking Widgets. It’s not necessary and we advise executing the strategy first and then double back to replace the basic website with a custom one.

Is this process approved by OTA/Channels?

We have crafted the strategy to comply with channels off booking platform policies to the best of our knowledge, but you should review the channels rules yourself and confirm if you want to implement and what changes you may want to make to be compliant if you have a different interpretation. We make no warranties or expressed statements that this program is approved or compliant.

1. Setup your direct booking website on a custom domain

Overview video:

  1. add a payout method first
    1. be sure to complete the full process
    2. It could take 24 hours for verification of your personal or business info
  2. Create a site
    1. Don’t worry about it being perfect, just get it live. You can always come back and change the templates, hero photo/video.
  3. Add a custom domain (example: wwww.staymontanta.com)
    1. You can search and purchase a domain directly inside of Hospitable. it is your domain to keep, if you leave hospitable, you can take it with you.
    2. do not us the hospitable generic domain (example: turkeyfarm.hospitable.rentals), search for a domain and purchase inside Hospitable if you don’t already have one)
      1. When a guest looks at your domain and it’s not a ‘normal’ domain (www.domain.com) then they think it’s spam, not professional, and they back out of the booking flow.
  4. Publish your site

https://www.loom.com/share/a87bad64f7834cc4b838e159659eba86?sid=b0ad731f-9376-4ba8-bf07-825aeec9a626

2. Add a Custom Video to your website

https://www.loom.com/share/9b2cf81eb6ac41b78b72d9718f63a02e

  1. use any AI video creation tool. I find xAI’s Grok is the best at video as of Aug 2026
    1. In the video I use Krea.ai which is a video and photo AI creator that has access to all the video models across LLM models
  2. Pick 4 images that would be great to animate, add all four to the prompt window
  3. Don’t pick interior photos, the video is intended to show the experience of the area and things to do
  4. If you need, go to Google Images, search your area, downtown, major attractions and use that image to create a unique image so you have copyright to it, then use that image for the video
  5. Use the prompt for a 10 second video (no sound):

3. Publish your site to Google Vacation Rentals (GVR)

Google Vacation Rentals