Guide
Knowledge for hosts who want to be booked directly.
Eleven guides on the Smoobu booking engine, pricing rules and direct bookings, written for holiday rental hosts who work with Smoobu.
Who writes this. Christian Strigl, who runs BineBoost. I rent out holiday apartments myself in the Ötztal valley in Tyrol, using Smoobu. Everything here is here because it was a problem for me or for a customer, not because it reads well.
How to read it. Wherever a claim is made about Smoobu, it carries a date. Software changes, and a sentence that is true today can be wrong in six months. If you spot something that no longer holds, drop me a line: I will correct it and put the new date on it.
The Smoobu booking engine
What it does, where it stops, and how to get it onto your website.
Smoobu booking engine add-ons: extensions, third party providers and upgrades
Smoobu runs a marketplace with nine categories, and the booking flow itself is not one of them (September 2026). Which category holds which providers, how a third party connects through the API, and the distinction everything hangs on: an alternative to Smoobu is a different system, an alternative to the Smoobu booking engine is an extension on the same account.
Read the guide →Customise the Smoobu booking engine to match your design
Smoobu's own help names a CSS field inside the booking engine and refers anything beyond it to a web developer (September 2026). Why CSS from your own website cannot reach into the iframe, and the three routes left when the booking flow has to look like your site.
Read the guide →Embed a Smoobu booking engine in WordPress
Step by step for Gutenberg and Elementor. Smoobu's help names the Custom HTML block as the place for the code (September 2026), so no plugin is needed. Plus the four traps (height, cookie banner, cache, HTTPS) almost everyone falls into once.
Read the guide →Embed your own booking engine in a Smoobu website
Ten steps with animations: first the booking flow onto the Book now page, then the search bar onto the home page. This is how we clicked through it in our own account, September 2026.
Read the guide →Multiple Smoobu accounts in one booking engine
For property managers and hosts with separate owner accounts: how every property becomes bookable together and each booking lands in the right account automatically.
Read the guide →Booking engines compared: Smoobu, Lodgify, Hostaway, Guesty & Beds24
What the booking flows of the PMS platforms deliver on your own website: design control, pricing rules, fees, data protection. And which combination suits whom.
Read the guide →Pricing and rules inside the booking
The topics where money is involved and a mistake gets expensive.
Child rates for your holiday rental
Baby free, child reduced, adults full. A host writes under Smoobu's own help article in August 2026 that price groups for different age bands cannot be set. What the workarounds cost you in bookings, and how age bands become bookable. With an interactive family price calculator.
Read the guide →Showing tourist tax correctly in a booking
Why tourist tax is in practice shown separately from the accommodation VAT rate, what a clean breakdown looks like, and what to watch for in your booking engine.
Read the guide →Down payment & cancellation policy: rules that hold up in practice
How high a down payment is usually set, which cancellation tiers work in practice, and the goodwill rule that makes arguments and bad reviews rarer.
Read the guide →Security deposit: when it is worth it and how much
Practical figures by property size, the three ways to collect one, where the legal limits sit, and why a deposit is in practice kept out of the total price.
Read the guide →Away from commission
What portal bookings really cost and how more guests book with you directly.
More direct bookings for your holiday rental
Seven levers from practice, from a bookable website through the direct booker advantage to the question of how portal guests become returning ones.
Read the guide →Two calculators, no sign-up
Both run in your browser. Your entries never leave the device and nothing is stored.
Commission calculator
What Booking.com, Airbnb and Vrbo cost you in commission per year, and what each additional direct booking saves.
Open the calculator →Occupancy calculator
Occupancy, annual revenue and revenue per available night, along with the most common mistake: choosing the wrong number of lettable nights.
Open the calculator →