As 2024 fast approaches, we want to take a few moments to reflect on the year behind us.
It’s all too easy to get hyper-focused on what’s coming next, especially if you prioritize productivity and progress. But sometimes, reflection on recent experiences and learnings is exactly what’s necessary for future growth.
For Lodgify, 2023 was a year of significant changes and achievements. We’re incredibly proud of the year we’ve had and are eager to share our favorite moments with our community of users and partners!
Lodgify turned 10!
One of our proudest moments in 2023 has been a long time coming: our 10th anniversary as a company!
Lodgify launched in 2013 with a team of just four people. After their families asked for help renting out their vacation rentals, Dennis Klett and Marco De Gregorio discovered a need in the industry. No existing software combined the ability to create websites and provide property management system features.
So they decided to create one.
Fast forward 10 years, and Lodgify has redefined the vacation rental industry. We’ve gone through multiple offices, logos, and websites. We’ve expanded our offerings and rapidly grown our team.
And most importantly, we’ve made good on our goal to empower independent hosts and property managers everywhere.
Our management team got even stronger
Lodgify also made two big changes this year to further strengthen our management team.
First, our co-founder Marco De Gregorio was promoted from his role as chief technology officer (CTO) to the newly created role of chief AI officer. We created this new position as part of our ongoing commitment to finding ways to improve our product.
De Gregorio has been essential in getting Lodgify’s software, engineering team, and core products off the ground. As chief AI officer, De Gregorio will oversee a team of machine learning engineers and drive AI integration across the company.
Second, Marco Cupidi has filled the newly vacated role of CTO.
Cupidi joined Lodgify as our VP of technology in early 2023 and previously served as engineering director at Adevinta, Europe’s leading classified ads marketplace. Cupidi’s new role will task him with accelerating product development, optimizing product reliability, and finding more efficient and sustainable solutions to customer challenges.
We grew (a lot) and celebrated together
2023 was a year of growth for the Lodgify team. We hired more than 150 new team members, more than doubling our size and growing our team to 300 employees!
We were lucky to be able to celebrate with our employees from the US and all over the world at two week-long company events in Barcelona in May and December. We also had an event in September for our LATAM team, which covers our US time zones.
These events were filled with workshops and team-building activities to improve our internal processes and get to know our new members!
Lodgify features got even better
We’re constantly working on creating new features to help you scale your business. Here are a few of the biggest new features we released this year.
More direct bookings with Google Vacation Rentals
In July we integrated with Google Vacation Rentals (GVR), Google’s search engine for short-term rental properties. Our integration with GVR means that your relevant properties will appear on Google’s interactive map when users search for accommodations, essentially providing free advertising.
Your properties even have the ability to outrank listings from popular listing sites, such as Airbnb and Vrbo. This means you can expect more direct traffic to your website and (as a result) more direct bookings.
The best part? No paying commissions to listing sites or fees for the service. We’re thrilled to be able to boost direct bookings for our customers free of charge!
AI-driven guest communications
September marked the launch of our new AI Assistant, a state-of-the-industry GPT-powered messaging tool designed to transform guest communications.
Located directly within your unified inbox, the AI Assistant analyzes guest questions and requests and then offers intuitive, customized responses by pulling from booking information, your account details, and general online data.
So when guests ask for, say, check-in details, you don’t have to waste time writing out an answer. Simply review the AI-generated response, edit it if necessary, and click send!
Simplifying Airbnb reviews
We know how important reviews are to your hosting success. To help streamline the process, we decided to integrate Airbnb reviews directly into the Lodgify platform.
Thanks to this new integration, you can now write Airbnb reviews for your guests, engage with their feedback in real-time, and access your entire review history directly from your Reviews tab.
Enhancing our PMS
Managing vacation rentals is hard, and it’s our job to make it easier. We’re constantly working to improve our PMS features to simplify your life (and help you grow your business).
This year, some of those improvements have included:
- Booking agenda widget: We made the user interface sleeker and more intuitive and changed the way bookings are displayed to simplify schedule management. Now, users have dedicated tabs for check-ins and check-outs over the next seven days as well as current guests.
- Rental duplication: Users now have the ability to duplicate an existing rental in the dashboard, making it easier to create multiple units without having to start from scratch each time.
- Recurring tasks: Thanks to our new recurring tasks feature, you can create tasks that recur on a regular basis—whether daily, weekly, monthly, or even quarterly. This not only saves you the time of recreating the same task manually, but also ensures you never forget important to-dos.
- Calendar improvements: We’ve made the Calendar feature easier for hosts to manage by updating the view that loads. Whichever view (Multi or Single) and filters you were using the last time you visited the Calendar will automatically appear the next time you visit. So, if you often need to see the same Calendar view and filters, there’s now no need to make the same manual adjustments each time!
Building a better website (builder)
We want to enable our customers to create amazing websites. And that starts with ensuring our Website Builder is the best it can be.
So, last summer we updated our Website Builder to do just that. This started with combining the Templates and Design section into a brand-new Styles section to make it more intuitive to manage your website’s appearance.
We also improved our user interface and added features to enhance the overall aesthetics of your website. These include the ability to modify your website’s colors to match those of your brand, more font options, “Book Now” button personalization, and even a logo resizer.
Leading OTAs continued to recognize us
The top OTAs in the industry—including Airbnb, Expedia, and Booking.com—continued to recognize Lodgify as a preferred partner in 2023.
And we’re proud to announce that Vrbo even upgraded us to Elite Partner status! This is the highest partnership status that Vrbo awards to their connectivity partners and comes with new benefits and resources that we can pass along to our users.
We’ll continue to work to maintain excellent relationships with our partners throughout 2024 to keep providing our users the best channel manager features and experience possible.
We won hospitality software awards
Prestigious software recommendation sites continued to recognize Lodgify as an industry leader in 2023.
Software Advice awarded us with “Most Recommended,” “Best Customer Support,” and “Front Runners” (a report of top products based on user reviews) in 2023.
Additionally, Capterra granted us their “Shortlist” status for three software rankings: Channel Management, Hospitality Property Management, and Vacation Rental. And GetApp named us “Category Leaders” for their Channel Management and Hotel Management categories.
We forged new partnerships
In addition to adding to and optimizing the features of our own product, we partnered with numerous companies in 2023 to improve what we can offer to our users. These integrations help make managing and growing your vacation rental business as easy as possible:
- Charge Automation handles contactless check-ins, payment processes, and security deposit collections. It also creates interactive digital guidebooks and customized upselling opportunities.
- DACK enhances the guest experience by offering digital access, property guides, contactless check-in and check-out, one-touch Wi-Fi, dynamic upsells, and local recommendations.
- Doinn connects vacation rental hosts and managers with hotel cleaning professionals, automates cleaning and laundry services, and provides unified customer support.
- DropInBlog allows hosts and property managers to create a professional and SEO-friendly blog and easily embed it into their short-term rental website.
- Folio makes it easy to create informative and stylish digital guidebooks for guests, addressing common guest questions, eliminating the need for repetitive inquiries, and improving the guest experience.
- Minut is a smart home monitoring device and software with features such as noise level detection, party prevention, and electricity wastage reduction, enhancing your property’s security and comfort without infringing on guests’ privacy.
- StayFi creates branded Wi-Fi splash pages that showcase your business and effortlessly gather guest information. From there, you can use StayFi’s email and text marketing capabilities to smoothly convert guests into loyal customers.
- Swikly is an online damage deposit solution that automates the collection of damage deposits for your bookings.
- Touch Stay provides digital guidebooks and a free guest messaging tool to make it easier than ever for hosts to share essential information with their guests.
- Vikey automates all aspects of check-in and check-out—including guest recognition and payment for upselling services—and enables remote opening of your vacation rental’s doors.
Lodgify customers can connect to the above integrations and more from our Apps page.
It’s been nine years since we first launched our blog, and we still haven’t run out of valuable resources to share with our readers!
Our top initiatives in 2023 included:
- Webinars with relevant industry stakeholders, including Heather Bayer and Zoey Berghoff
- An Airbnb Income Calculator to help you calculate how much you could make on Airbnb
- Success Stories depicting how our customers have grown their businesses with Lodgify
- Two new online courses in the Lodgify Academy on How to Create and Run a Successful Airbnb Business and All about Dynamic Pricing
- Industry reports on bookings for the summer season, Labor Day weekend, and Christmas as well as a report on unauthorized parties
- Guides and templates to boost your vacation rental business
- Numerous new blogs!
We felt the love
We received over 600 reviews from customers across global review platforms in 2023, bringing our average review rating to 4.4/5. We always appreciate feedback—good or bad—and are grateful to everyone who has taken the time to leave comments about their experience with Lodgify.
See where to find Lodgify reviews to compare us online.
We traveled the globe for industry events
Usually, it’s our customers’ guests who do all the traveling. But this year, we were fortunate enough to get to attend and represent Lodgify at seven major vacation rental industry events all over the world:
- Short Stay Summit in London
- Book Direct Show in Barcelona
- Scale Show in Barcelona
- Short Term Rentalz Summit in London
- VRMA International Conference in Orlando
- Vacation Rental World Summit in Barcelona
- ExpoRV in Cancun
But we weren’t simply in attendance—we also got the chance to share our expertise! Our head of marketing, Carla Chicharro, took part in a debate at the Short Term Rentalz Summit on the topic of whether direct bookings are more expensive than booking with OTAs and presented on SEO for vacation rentals at ExpoRV.
Additionally, our COO Alex Vuilleumier spoke in a panel about balancing your marketing and distribution channels at the Short Stay Summit in London. We also sponsored a party at Planet Hollywood after the VRMA International Conference in Orlando. (It can’t be all work!)
Here’s to even more success next year!
We still can’t believe how far we’ve come in the past 10 years. And we can’t wait to continue these efforts to help hosts start and grow their vacation rental businesses in the year (and many years) to come.
But first, we want to say THANK YOU to all of our customers, partners, and everyone else who has played a part in making 2023 such an exceptional year. We couldn’t have done it without you!
And for those of you who haven’t tried Lodgify yet, sign up for our free trial below! Or book a demo call with one of our agents to get a run-through of our product here.
