StayBranch, In Plain English

If you have found your way here, it is probably because you rent out somewhere. A condo, a cabin, an RV lot, a field somebody parks a camper on. And you have worked out that the booking platform taking a slice of every stay is the largest line item in a business that does not have many line items.

StayBranch exists for that. It is a direct booking system: your own booking site, your own guests, your own card payments, and no commission taken out of the middle.

What it is, concretely

Not a listing site. There is no StayBranch marketplace that guests browse, and you should be suspicious of anybody who promises you one, because building an audience of travelers is a decade long job that nobody does quickly.

What you get is the machinery underneath a direct booking business:

• A booking site of your own, with your properties, your photos, your rates and your rules, on your own web address.
• Card payments that land in your Stripe account, with deposits handled properly.
• A calendar that syncs both ways with Airbnb, VRBO and Booking.com, so listing in both places does not double book you.
• Guest messaging, confirmation and pre-arrival emails and texts, all editable rather than locked.
• Cleaning, with cleaners assigned to properties and turnover cleans scheduled automatically off the checkout date.
• Reviews collected after a stay, and a guidebook guests can read before they arrive.

The math that makes it worth doing

Run your own numbers rather than trusting anybody's marketing, including ours. Take last year's gross from the platforms, and work out what came off the top in host fees and payment processing.

For most owners that number is uncomfortable to look at written down. And the important part is that it is not a fixed cost, it is a percentage, so it grows exactly as fast as you do. Every improvement you make to your property, every rate rise you earn, hands a proportional share to somebody else.

Direct booking flips that. Your costs stay flat while the revenue moves.

You do not have to leave the platforms

This is the part people worry about, and the worry is reasonable. Airbnb and the rest are genuinely good at one thing you cannot replicate: putting your property in front of a stranger who has never heard of you.

So do not leave. Keep the listings, keep taking the discovery, and use the calendar sync so the dates stay honest across all of them.

The shift is what happens on the second stay. A guest who already came once, liked it and wants to come back does not need a marketplace to find you. If they can book direct, that booking is worth meaningfully more to you and often slightly less to them. Repeat guests are where a direct booking business gets built, and they are the bookings the platforms are least entitled to.

StayBranch or ClientBranch?

Two names, one platform, and it is worth ninety seconds to land in the right place.

StayBranch is for people whose business is the property. You want more rental bookings, better pricing, cleaners who show up, and guests who come back. You do not need invoices, proposals, contracts or a CRM, and you would rather not pay for them or look at them in a menu.

ClientBranch is for a solo business that sells its own time and skill. A therapist, a photographer, a performer, a coach. Bookings, yes, but also invoices, proposals, contracts, email marketing and a client database.

StayBranch is run by ClientBranch and sits on the same platform, which is why it is stable and why the rental features keep arriving. If you start on StayBranch and later want the full suite, you upgrade. Nothing gets migrated and nothing gets lost, because it was never a separate system.

If you signed up and the dashboard looks like it is showing you tools for a business you do not run, you are very likely on the wrong one of the two. That is a two minute fix, so ask rather than working around it.

What the first afternoon looks like

Getting a property live is genuinely an afternoon, not a project.

1. Add the property. Photos, description, what it has. RV lots and land get their own field set, so you are describing hookups and pads rather than being asked how many bedrooms your field has.
2. Set your rates and rules. Nightly or monthly, minimum and maximum nights, check in and check out times, cancellation policy.
3. Connect Stripe. This is what turns a nice looking page into something that takes money. It is the step people put off, and it is the only one that matters on day one.
4. Turn on the booking site and send the link to somebody. A past guest is the ideal first test, because they already trust you.

The dashboard checklist walks you through this in order and only two of the steps are required, so you are not blocked on filling in a profile you do not care about.

Where the money really leaks

Commission is the obvious cost. The quieter one is everything you do by hand because no system does it.

Messaging a cleaner about a Sunday turnover. Remembering which guest asked about early check in. Chasing a review that would have brought the next booking. Retyping a guidebook into a message for the ninth time.

None of that has a line on an invoice, and together it is most of a working week over a season. Automating it is less exciting than saving the commission, and over a year it is worth about as much.

Start with one property

Do not migrate everything on the first day. Put your best performing property in, get one direct booking through it, and see how the whole loop feels from the guest's side, including the confirmation email and the pre-arrival note.

When that works, the rest is copying a setup you already trust rather than gambling on one you do not.

The video at the top is a short introduction to what StayBranch is and who it suits. The StayBranch quick start guide has the setup steps in order, and the Rentals guide covers properties, pricing, guests and cleaning in detail.