How to Add a Room Booking Engine to Promote My Place

Among all possible options, two broad categories exist for creating a website to showcase your rental accommodations. The first group includes using one of the available CMSs like WordPress or Joomla on your rented hosting account or even your own server. The second group encompasses choosing one of the online website builders like Wix or Squarespace.

Promote My Place stands out as an intriguing example within the second category due to its specific focus on rental listings. The following lines will be dedicated to answering the question of how to add a vacation rental booking engine to a website created on the basis of this online platform. Even though it’s very simple, Promote My Place reviews are rather positive.

How to Create a Vacation Rental Website With the Help of Promote My Place

Before we delve into the main topic of our article, let’s first familiarize ourselves with the process of website creation using PromoteMyPlace. Upon visiting the platform, you can take advantage of a free 14-day trial and explore the inner structure of the dashboard.

After registration, right from the start, you will be introduced to the step-by-step process of website creation:

Upon pressing the “New Website” button, you will be directed to a page with initial important parameters like “Website Name”, where you can pick a subdomain, enter a brief description, and select a default language:

Next, you will need to add details related to your properties:

For the sake of brevity, we will not provide all the following steps of website creation with the help of this holiday home rental software. More comprehensive instructions can be found here. An overall help portal, where all the main intricacies of the setting-up process are showcased, can be found here: https://promotemyplace.zendesk.com/hc/en-us.

An important point to note is that Promote My Place, being explicitly tailored for the vacation rental market, offers a step-by-step website builder, with a primary focus on showcasing your properties in the most efficient manner. This peculiarity allows you to easily and quickly establish an online presence for your business.

With the help of this holiday home rental software, you can also benefit from embedded tools that are essential for the niche, such as functionalities for managing bookings, reservations, and accepting payments.

Moreover, the website builder is coupled with a variety of professionally designed vacation rental website templates and has a multitude of customization options, which allows property owners to craft an online project that resonates with their vision and appeals to prospective guests.

Key Features of Promote My Place

1. User-friendly website builder.
2. Professional-looking vacation rental templates.
3. Extensive customization options.
4. Booking and reservation management tools.
5. Built-in payment gateways.
6. SEO-friendly design.
7. Responsive customer support.
8. Mobile-optimized websites.

To compare this service with Wix, please review the table:

Although platforms like Wix furnish robust website-building capacities, they are not focused primarily on the needs of property owners. Therefore, the cohesive, specialized solutions rendered by PromoteMyPlace present it as an attractive option for individuals within the vacation rental industry.

What is BNBForms: A Superior Alternative to Promote My Place’s Default Reservation Features

While Promote My Place offers some default booking functionalities, they are quite basic. It is possible to specify whether children or pets are allowed, set up booking charges, turn on notifications, and enable payment acceptance via PayPal and Stripe. Below is a screenshot of the reservation tab on this platform:

When discussing websites created using any possible Content Management System hosted on your account — be it WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. — it’s possible to add a corresponding booking extension to address all reservation needs. But what if you used an online constructor like Wix or the subject of our discussion, Promote My Place? Are you limited only to the solutions offered by these platforms? The answer is “No”.

As its name implies, such a remarkable holiday home rental software as BNBForms offers the opportunity to construct booking forms and embed them anywhere — be it a public CMS, your own development using Django, ASP.Net, etc., or even an online website builder. In other words, if you’re looking to add a vacation rental booking engine to your website, this SaaS platform is an excellent choice.

The secret lies in the architecture of this system. When you register on BNBForms, you gain access to an online account with all possible settings regarding the reservation forms. Booking management also occurs within this dashboard, while the frontend part is embedded in the form of JavaScript code or as an iframe on an external website.

And, as you are probably aware, any website, regardless of the underlying technology, allows the embedding of JavaScript code, or at least an “iframe” HTML tag, if you are an admin of this site.

What Capabilities Does BNBForms Offer?

To answer briefly, BNBForms is a comprehensive vacation rental booking engine that can be embedded on any website, regardless of its underlying technology.

To provide a more detailed answer, here are the three main groups of features that this platform is capable of providing for you:

1. Dashboard Section: Keeping track of bookings, managing payments, and the ability to review a calendar showing available and reserved time slots.
2. Booking Engine: A robust reservation system will help you tailor your accommodation types, manage seasonal dates, set pricing, and handle booking rules. You can also create discount coupon codes, customize email alerts, add extra services, handle taxes and fees, and export booking reports. Plus, you can synchronize bookings with Online Travel Agencies if you list your offerings on these platforms too (Airbnb, Booking.com, etc.). You can also tweak general reservation settings, activate various payment methods, and set up automated notifications.
3. Booking Widget: You can tweak its general settings, add photos, edit mini-pages that customers can visit during the booking process, modify menus, and customize the widget’s appearance.

A subsequent advantage is that BNBForms is a reputable service, which ensures that confirmation emails sent to your guests will be delivered with absolute certainty. While it may seem trivial, setting up the email delivery process from your own website can be quite intricate. Particularly if your domain name is new, email servers from platforms like Google may not initially trust it. However, by opting for BNBForms, you can rest assured that all emails related to orders will not be directed to the SPAM folder.

To explore the platform capabilities for yourself, don’t hesitate to visit https://bnbforms.com/ and get access to a free trial, which is available for a month at the time of writing.

How to Create a Booking Form for Vacation Rental Booking Engine With BNBForms

As we said before, if you use BNBForms to create a reservation widget, you can stick it on any website that can handle JavaScript or an iframe HTML tag, including sites created with the help of the Promote My Place website. But how exactly can we create this booking widget? Follow these steps:

Visit https://bnbforms.com/ and click “Free Trial”. Fill in the registration form. For our specific scenario — using an online website constructor, and a “Vacation Rental” type of property — select “Other” in the “Content Management System” field and choose the corresponding option in the “Property Type” drop-down menu,

Confirm registration through the link sent to your email. Upon clicking this URL, you will be logged in automatically. However, once your session expires, you can log in again using the credentials provided in the same message.

Add your rental properties or hotel rooms and configure all the necessary options for them.

– Change the widget settings as per your requirements.
– You can modify general form settings such as the title, tagline, etc.
– Upload photos to further enrich the pages related to your booking form.

– Edit the pages involved in the booking process (like order confirmation).
– Edit menus of the booking form.
– And adjust the widget’s appearance using the visual editor.

As soon as you have made all the necessary modifications, you can obtain the JavaScript or iframe code of the widget by pressing the top left menu button labeled “Widget Script”.

And here is the code itself, which you should copy to embed on your website:

Besides tweaking the booking form, there’s a whole world of possibilities that open up when you dive into the settings of the vacation rental Booking Engine.

Want to know more? Check out the detailed BNBForms guide and View client websites.

Step-by-Step: Adding a Reservation Form to Your Website Created with Promote My Place

We have discussed how to adjust the settings and obtain the code itself for the reservation widget on BNBForms. But how do we go about embedding it on a Promote My Place website? Follow these steps:

Go to “Website Basics” on your Promote My Place dashboard for the specific website where you want to add the booking form:

Then navigate to the “Code” section of the menu:

Add the code that you obtained by following the steps in the section “How To Create a Booking Form With BNBForms” to the form titled “Code – Header” and press the “Save” button:

That is it. Now, a small button will appear at the top right corner of each page on your website created with the help of the Promote My Place website builder:

If your visitor presses it, here’s what they will see:

Yes, this is exactly the reservation form for your vacation rental property that you created in your personal account on BNBForms.

The fields your visitor will see are pretty much what you’d expect during the booking process: check-in and check-out dates, along with a button that sends the corresponding request to the backend of your vacation rental booking engine to check whether this period is available for reservation.

Among the indisputable advantages is that the result is returned in mere fractions of a second. Despite BNBForms serving as a robust platform for thousands of websites and ensuring a smooth and seamless booking process, you can rest assured that your visitors will be able to check available dates and book the corresponding properties without any hitches. In other words, no guest will be lost due to technical issues.

Returning to the booking process itself, when your guest clicks on the “Confirm Reservation” button, they will be able to provide additional details related to the booking and even make a payment.

For brevity’s sake, we aren’t providing screenshots of the complete form at this stage. However, we’d like to mention that the fields are pretty standard, including full name, address, type of payment (whether on arrival or via direct bank transfer), and so on.

Upon filling out the form and submitting it, your guest will see the “Success” message:

You, in turn, will be able to view and manage this reservation within your personal dashboard on the BNBForms website:

We’ve aimed to provide you with a moderate level of information regarding the process of adding a vacation rental booking engine to your online presence, created with the help of Promote My Place.

To summarize briefly, all you need to do is register on BNBForms, add information about your vacation rentals, designate your rates and pricing options, obtain the corresponding code, and embed it into your website using the appropriate features of Promote My Place.

If you want to delve deeper into BNBForms, please visit the Documentation section.

Conclusion: Why Vacation Rental Booking Engine from BNBForms is the Way to Go

The primary advantage of BNBForms is that it operates as a Software as a Service (SaaS) system, housed separately from your website created with PromoteMyPlace.

This means that such a structure is more reliable because your own resource is responsible only for content showcasing, while all the reservation logic is stored in a more reliable place. It’s akin to using Booking.com, however, in this case, you can craft a much more attractive property website with plenty of pictures, videos, descriptions of properties, stories from satisfied guests, and so on, while maintaining the same high level of reservation efficiency with direct bookings.

Perhaps the most significant benefit is that, unlike Booking.com and similar services, with BNBForms you pay only once a year, or monthly, but not for each booking or property. Can you imagine the amount of money you could save? Moreover, even if you have your project listed on Booking.com, Airbnb, or other platforms, BNBForms is capable of synchronizing reservations between these different systems, preventing overbookings.

To sum it all up, if you’re looking to add a vacation rental booking engine to your website built on Promote My Place (or even any other platform), pairing up with BNBForms is a smart move. It’s a cost-effective and reliable option that keeps the booking process sleek and professional, much like what you’d experience with big names like Airbnb or HomeAway.