Your guests book you. Not a marketplace.
We build branded direct booking websites for owners running a handful of units up to a small portfolio. Real-time availability, synced channels, pricing that moves with demand, and the guest relationship staying with you.
Six things that quietly
cost you a unit's worth of profit
None of these are dramatic on their own. Together they are the difference between a portfolio that pays for itself and one that pays a platform.
Every booking pays a tax
Airbnb and Booking.com take 15 to 18% before you have paid the cleaner. On a unit turning over AED 200,000 a year that is a salary walking out of the door.
You never actually meet your guest
The platform owns the email address, the phone number and the review. A guest who loved the apartment has no way to come back to you directly next year.
Pricing is a guess
Flat rates through GITEX, New Year and the Shopping Festival. Then empty weeks in August at the same price, because nobody had time to change it.
Two calendars, one very bad morning
A booking lands on Airbnb, the direct enquiry came in yesterday, and now two families have the same apartment on the same night.
The same five messages, fifty times a month
Check-in instructions. Wifi password. Where to park. How the aircon works. Typed out again by hand, usually at eleven at night.
You cannot see what you actually made
Gross revenue is on a dashboard somewhere. Net, after commission, cleaning, laundry, utilities and the DEWA bill, lives in a spreadsheet you update when you remember.
Four parts, one system
A booking site that is genuinely yours
Your name above the door, your photography, your policies. Live availability, card payments, deposits and instant confirmation, so a guest can book at midnight without you being awake.
Illustrative interface, not live data.
Channels that stay in sync
Your direct site, Airbnb and Booking.com all reading from one calendar through your channel manager. A night sold anywhere closes everywhere, in seconds, without anyone touching a spreadsheet.
Pricing that does not sit still
Rates that climb into GITEX and New Year and soften in the quiet weeks, inside limits you set. PriceLabs or the equivalent does the maths, you keep the floor and the ceiling.
Illustrative demand curve, not live data.
The guest journey, handled
Confirmation, pre-arrival details, door codes, checkout reminder and a review request, sent on time without you typing any of it. Add experiences at the point the guest is most likely to say yes.
From a call to a live platform
No proposal theatre. The first call is diagnostic, and if custom software is the wrong answer for the size you are at, we will tell you on that call.
We map how many units you run, which channels you sell on, what you use today, and where the time goes. You get an honest read on whether custom is even the right answer for you.
A written scope, a prototype path and a real number. Not a range designed to get a second meeting.
Your properties, your branding, clickable. This is where you decide whether to carry on, with something in front of you rather than a slide.
Integrations connected, payments live, staff trained, handover done.
Clickable, on your own units, before the full build is committed.
Depending on how many channels and systems have to be connected.
Full code, documentation and deployment config handed over. No per-unit licence.
You see the thing running, not a status report.
What owners ask before they commit
I only have three or four apartments. Is custom software actually worth it for me?
Probably not, and we will say so on the call. Below roughly five units the honest answer is usually a template builder like Lodgify plus a channel manager, and we would rather tell you that than take the project. Custom starts paying back when commission savings and staff time exceed the build, which for most operators lands somewhere between five and fifteen units, sooner if your average nightly rate is high.
How is this different from the website builder inside Hostaway or Lodgify?
Those are templates with your logo on them, and they are genuinely fine to start with. The differences that matter later: you cannot change what the template will not do, you keep paying per unit forever, the booking flow is theirs so you cannot test against it, and your guest data lives in their system. A custom build is yours outright, fits the way you actually operate, and can carry things a template will not, such as an AI concierge, experiences and upsells, or an owner portal.
Do I have to leave Airbnb and Booking.com?
No, and you should not. The OTAs are excellent at reaching a guest who has never heard of you. The goal is to stop paying commission on the guests who already know you, and on the ones who find you directly. Most operators we talk to are aiming to move perhaps 20 to 40% of nights direct over a year or two, not 100%.
What about DTCM licensing and UAE compliance?
Your holiday home licence is yours to hold, we do not touch it. What we build around it is the part that keeps you compliant in practice: capturing the guest details the regulations require, storing them properly, and keeping your data inside a UAE region if that matters to you. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud all have UAE regions and we can deploy there.
What does it cost, roughly?
It depends on how many channels and systems have to connect, and we quote after the discovery call rather than before. What we can say up front is the shape: a fixed-fee discovery sprint to scope and de-risk, then a custom-quoted build. You will have a real number within a few working days of the call, in writing.
What happens if I want to move away from you later?
You take everything. Source code, documentation, deployment configuration, the lot, handed over on completion. There is no licence to keep paying and no technical reason you cannot hand it to another team. We would rather earn the next piece of work than lock you in to this one.
Bring your numbers. We will do the maths with you.
Tell us how many units you run and where your bookings come from today, and we will tell you what a direct channel is actually worth to you, before anybody talks about building anything.
30 minutes, with an engineer
Not a sales call. Bring your channel mix, your unit count and your current stack, and you will leave the call knowing what this would cost and whether it is worth it.
Prefer email? Write to hello@autonoid.ai.