How to integrate your holiday lets website with iPro in the simplest & most cost effective way

iPro provides a suite of powerful tools, for the integration with your holiday lets website

Your holiday lets website is your no. 1 investment for your business, it is the asset that you have complete control over.  So utilising tools like WordPress and even Wix, are a great starting point for a cost effective website that can grow and expand with your business.

However within the hospitality industry it’s important that you provide lots of functionality that enables guests to find their perfect rental for the dates and budget that suits them and then allowing them to #bookdirect.

These features can be expensive to implement, however with the plugins we offer below your web designers can focus on your brand and style while iPro provides easy to use plugins for the more advanced functionalities.

Search plugin

This is the most important part of any holiday lets agency website, how do guests find the right property for them.

We are delighted to showcase our amazing advanced search engine, clients can build their own filters and amenities within the iPro CMS and choose which facilities should be available within the filter system.

Our Search has been designed on the leading websites such as www.airbnb.co.uk, www.jamesvillas.co.uk, www.oliverstravels.com, 

With our powerful search, you can easily build your own search form for the homepage and then you simply pass the url extension to our plugin via Javascript and the results will be filtered to whatever the guest has selected. 

These filters can be matched to the clients requirements, we recommend a simple search on the homepage i.e.

• Location
• Dates
• Guests
• Pets
• 1 key filter max

On your search results page, you provide a more advanced search form that will allow the guest to filter the results to their exact requirements.

Booking Form

Option 1

Booking form with 1 month calendar

Option 2

Booking form with 2 month drop down calendar

Option 3

Calendar and booking form, the calendar can show 3, 6 or 9 months.

Checkout Page

By utilising the iPro checkout pages, you are providing your website with an immediate professional experience, join the #bookdirect movement and allow your guests to easily find, desire and book your holiday homes.

Our feature rich experience will not only ensure your guests have complete trust and confidence in you and your business, but they will ensure you maximise your revenue by offering additional up-sells during the checkout process and after.

• Instant Book
• Fully mobile responsive
  • Guests can book via mobile, tablet or desktop
• Cart abandonment
  • Auto follow up
  • IP & Details recorded
• Vouchers
• Holiday extras / Upsell opportunities
• Discounts
• Multiple payment provider integrations
  • SagePay
  • WorldPay
  • Stripe
  • PayPal
  • Offer offline options i.e. Bank Transfer
• Automated confirmation messages
  • Provisional booking
  • Deposit paid
  • Paid in full
• Customisable Header & Footer
  • Set colour scheme
  • Set fonts

Integration Options

Embed Booking Form

Depending on you wish the guest journey to work with your own website, will determine if you can embed  the booking form within your on site, so that you retain the url of the root domain with the url browser.

You can easily embed the following page into your ‘checkout / booking form page’, to embed the booking form into a web page you will simply take the iPro URL for the property and append the extension ‘?alttemplate=iframecalendar’ to the url i.e.

secure.clientdomain.com/cottages/england/gloucestershire/moreton-in-marsh/quintessential-cottage/?alttemplate=iframecalendar

With this integration, you can still track your guests via google analytics, but the guest will not see the url change i.e.

www.clientdomain.com/property/booking

Please note that the iPro booking system will run on the following url:

secure.clientdomain.com

Redirect to sub domain

The 2nd option and most simplest is to redirect to our web pages i.e 

https://secure.clientdomain.com/cottages/england/gloucestershire/moreton-in-marsh/quintessential-cottage/?alttemplate=checkout_guest&t=acc&checkin=29/08/2020&checkout=05/09/2020&adults=1&children=0&infants=0&propertyId=11044&propertylanguageId=0&sourceId=&propertyCurrencyId=11044

You have the option to fully customise the header and footer, so that you can be sure your website branding is on point and the guest will feel as if they have moved to a fully secure part of the website for the important part of their journey.

In regards to look and feel, a good website integration should ensure that the guest doesn’t feel like they have left your brand.

By utilising this integration you can be sure that you have a fully responsive website that will provide the perfect guest experience on any device while booking your properties.

Guest & Owner Portal

The guest portal

Automation and streamlined operations are key to ensure that your holiday let agency is profitable and sustainable.

However you need to get the right balance as hospitality demands your time.  

Guests demand a high level of service, by utilising our simple guest portal. 

You can provide each and every guest with everything they need to ensure they are fully prepared for their holiday and have all the information they could ever possibly wish for.

You can run our guest portal via our own url as per the checkout pages or you can embed the iframe into your own page so that the url remains as the root domain.

We would recommend that you run from our secure url i.e https://secure.clientdomain.com/guests/

This way you can be sure that everything is fully responsive and available via the guest mobile phone.  Also if the branding is done for the checkout pages this will be replicated for the guest portal.

The owner portal

An area that is overlooked is the amount of time and effort that is put into ‘keeping owners happy’, these are the lifeblood of your business as without owners you have no properties.

However like everything in life there are good holiday let owners and bad holiday let owners, so let’s look at how you can make looking after them more consistent, more efficient and a more happier experience.

Providing an ‘Owner Portal’, that is the first port of call for them to review performance, to update availability, to request a change or to simply update their profile.

Now imagine that you can use this area to showcase best practices, recommendations, latest news on legislation etc..

The more information you can provide on a one to many basis, while making it as easy as possible for owners to pick up the phone to talk. The better the the experience you will have.

I thoroughly recommend taking advantage of our ‘Owner Portal’, working hard to encourage your owners to always go there first and communicate via the platform.

We would recommend that you run from our secure url i.e https://secure.clientdomain.com/owners/

Building landing pages

Utilising the search plugins, you will be able to build dynamic landing pages.  This will provide the holiday let agency to build out Read our 3 top tips for an seo friendly site landing pages that will target their perfect buyer persona.

You can combine the API here to build a drop down selector from the Amenities API:

https://github.com/iprosoftware/api-csharp-client/wiki/Attributes

This will update the search url as follows:

Villa = ID 1368

https://secure.clientdomain.com/search?&attributes=1368

This webpage will then show all properties that have been classified as villas.

Utilising this simple function you can build out any type of page i.e. Pet Friendly, Hot tubs, cozy cottages, villas with pools, sea views, perfect for families, etc…

You can also build the CMS so that the client can build and customise these themselves, the more flexibility you can provide here the more room for growth the client will have.