StayClubs is where trusted communities run their own booking clubs: your people, your brand, your handpicked stays, with live availability. Guests book direct with the property. The club gets the credit. Private clubs get paid.
Free to build. Free to join. No monthly fees. We only earn when a club delivers a booking.
Both endings hand the guest relationship to someone else.
Scale until the spreadsheet forgives you, and hope you don't lose what made guests love you in the first place.
Sell to the consolidator, while everyone left standing rents their guests from the same giant platforms at the platforms' prices.
There is a third path: self-selected communities of operators. Shared marketing. Shared standards. Loyalty none of them could build alone. The fragments are unique. What has been missing is the connective tissue.
Built around what travelers actually care about: a standard, a place, a passion, a person they trust.
Anyone creates one, anyone joins. Game Day Stays, Ski Towns, Pet-Friendly, Wellness Retreats, and the smallest niches you can imagine.
Certifications, masterminds, creator audiences, partner networks. The owner approves who is in, and the club shares in every booking it drives.
One booking connection puts a property in every club it qualifies for. Homes, cabins, unique motels, boutique hotels. Never chains. Listed only on the OTAs? There is still a way in.
Self-serve by design, with hands-on setup for the founding cohort.
Name it, brand it, pick public or private. Free, forever.
Pick what qualifies a stay. Matching inventory joins automatically as it connects, and you can invite operators directly.
Live availability, direct booking on the operator's own engine, every stay attributed to your club.
A club is a booking community with live inventory. Here is what that looks like in the wild.
A mastermind of property managers opens a club of member properties. The community they already built becomes shared distribution, and the club shares in every booking it drives.
A travel creator turns followers into members. Handpicked stays that fit the niche, stories and embeds from their own feed, bookings attributed to the club they own.
A certifier or vendor builds the club of properties that meet the standard: accessibility, pet-ready, quality-inspected. The badge becomes a bookable place, not just a logo.
A destination's operators, restaurants, and guides band together: stays plus local events, experiences, and landmarks on the club map. The town markets itself.
A marketing agency builds and runs clubs for its clients: club strategy, content, email, social. A new service line for the agency, a new channel for every client.
A travel planner's private club: the properties they trust, for the clients they serve, with the planner sharing in every booking placed inside.
Free to sign up, free to create, free to join. No monthly software fee. A property pays a single percentage of an attributed reservation, and only when a club actually delivered that booking. The price never changes with the path. What changes is who shares it.
Anyone can create a public club and anyone can join it. The club builds the audience, we run the rails.
Invitation-only clubs earn a share of every booking they drive. Build the community, own the economics.
If a marketing company or booking engine connected the property, they earn a slice of the same fee. Never an extra fee on top.
Marketing companies and booking engines connect the properties, so they earn a slice of the same single fee on every attributed booking from every client they connect. Never an extra fee on top, and no engineering to start: a deep-link format and a promo code.
Your clients' engines already take direct bookings. Confirm your links preserve campaign parameters, issue a club promo code, and your whole roster is bookable inside the clubs.
A slice of the fee on every attributed booking from clients you connect, for as long as you are the partner of record, plus billable club work that renews: club strategy, content, email, and social.
Attributed direct bookings at a fraction of the OTAs' take, with the guest relationship staying exactly where it belongs: with them.
The working prototype is public: browse the clubs, open a stay, watch the attribution follow the booking, open the founder dashboard, build your own club in the wizard. Demo data, real model.
Property managers and their partner networks · vendors and certifiers · masterminds and communities · travel creators · travel planners and advisors · hosts, boutique hotels, and unique motels.
Every real decision gets written down here: what we chose, what we rejected, and what we still do not know. If you are considering a founding club, this is the honest version of the pitch.
Operators are handed two endings: get big or get bought. There is a third one, it has been sitting in plain sight for years, and the only reason it has not been built is that nobody wanted to own the boring part.
Read the note →One newsletter for the whole platform now. Every club gets its own later, and they will roll up to this one.
Also on Trail Markers, where I write about where this industry is headed.
Got it. We reply personally, usually within a day.
I have been in vacation rentals since 2008: operator side, vendor side, and now on my own. I live and work on the Outer Banks, I co-host The Art of Hospitality podcast, and I write Trail Markers, a newsletter about where this industry is headed.
The belief behind StayClubs is the one that runs through all of that work. The industry is splitting: professionals doing the full job on one side, everyone renting their guests from the OTAs on the other. Brand, reviews, and direct relationships are what the next era rewards, and operators should not have to get big or get bought to earn them. Clubs are the connective tissue.