The Note behind this club · September 5, 2026, updated September 7
A club whose roster is a table of contents
Every club I have built so far started with a place or a standard. This one started with a book.
Hospitable Hosts is five volumes of short-term rental operators writing their own chapters. Why they started, what went wrong, what hospitality actually costs when you are the one paying for it. More than two hundred authors across the series. Jodie Odlin publishes it out of the UK and runs her own rental company in the Cotswolds while she does it.
The author list is public on the publisher's site. That makes it something rare in this industry: a roster somebody already assembled, already vouched for, and already put in print.
What I did with it
Read the list, and asked one question of each name: do you run a vacation rental business with your own booking site?
Most of the answers were no. The list is thick with coaches, investors, and hosts who take bookings only on the big platforms. That is fine, and it is most of this industry. But eight of them run real homes on their own sites, and now those eight are on one page.
Ohio Amish country. Whistler. Hocking Hills. A cottage in Tetbury. Port Stephens and the Southern Highlands in New South Wales. A studio cabin outside Saratoga. Columbus, where free parking is the amenity.
The first homes on this network outside the United States
That was not a plan. It is what happens when the roster comes from a book instead of a map. A place-based club is bounded by geography; an affinity club is bounded by whoever showed up. The Cotswolds and the Hunter region are on stayclubs.com now because two women who manage homes there wrote chapters in the same anthology as a guy in Columbus.
I think that is the more interesting shape, and I did not expect to learn it this way.
What the page does not claim
I did not read the chapters. The club does not say these are the best hosts, or vouch for the stays. The page says exactly one thing: this person wrote a chapter, here is where the publisher lists them, and here is a home they manage on their own booking site. A published chapter is a fact about a book. It is not a rating.
That is the same rule the safety club runs on, and the accessibility club, and the Breckenridge permit club. Somebody else's list, quoted and linked. We do not author.
Who should own this
Jodie. She assembled the authors, she has the relationships, she has a community platform already pointed at them, and her own Cotswolds cottage is the first home on the page. The club is a storefront for a thing she already built, and it earns on every booking it sends.
If you wrote a chapter and you book direct, send me the link and I will add you.
Update, September 7
A second pass through the author list found nine more who run their own booking sites: Island Park, West Yellowstone, Sevierville, Ocean City, Bella Vista, Branson, Tacoma, the Peak District, and the KwaZulu-Natal coast. Seventeen homes from seventeen operators now. Two direct-booking sites named in the first version, Cajun Stays and Unveiled, had no live listing page when checked, so they are on the record and not on the page.
About one hundred sixty authors listed. Seventeen of them take bookings on their own site. That gap is still the whole business.
Facts on the club page are what each host's listing states, checked September 2026. Author credits per the publisher's public list.
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Preview from Tetbury Escapes (Jodie Odlin)'s listing
