Anyone used Boostly for a website and marketing to drive guest towards it for direct booking?

Considering using Boostly for a new website and to increase my direct bookings. I currently have an OR hosted site that I completely control and I'm not unhappy with it but I haven't been successful driving traffic to it or in generating direct bookings. Saw the recent Boostly webinar and wondered if any OR members have worked with them. How well do their websites integrate with OR? How was the experience overall? Do their recommended social media and email marketing strategies drive traffic to the site and increase direct bookings? Would love to hear from someone who has onboarded with them. Thanks!

-Paul

I recently went through the Boostly onboarding process and ultimately decided not to move forward. The product never reached a point where I could approve or launch it, and it didn’t meet the professional standards I was expecting—particularly with how it handled my OwnerRez data.

I’m sure others have had different experiences, but my advice would be to proceed with caution. Read all the reviews (Trustpilot, Capterra, etc.), and make sure their templated approach truly fits what you need—especially if you’re used to having full control with OwnerRez. If you’re not unhappy with your current site, it might be more effective to invest in traffic and marketing support than to rebuild your entire platform.

I’d definitely look into the opinion of others on Facebook about them.

Thanks Deb,

I did end up moving forward and had a similar experience as you. My website is live and it looks ok. Somewhat boilerplate but professional enough. Here are my observations:

Very low integration with OwnerRez. Only one paragraph of the site receives copy from OwnerRez. The booking widget works. (I think. I haven't gotten a booking through it yet but I also haven't specifically tried to drive traffic to it yet).

No syncing of pictures, reviews, amenities, descriptions etc. (except for the "Short Description")

The boostly site is much more complicated to maintain then OwnerRez. I'm in tech and did Web development for years earlier in my career. The suite of technologies and embedded dependencies require more bandwidth to maintain than I have as a single-property manager. There are hours and hours of training videos that you need to hunt-and-peck through to figure out how to make the update you want. You need to be (or hire) an active web developer to maintain this site, and not just a dabbling Wordpress person. Perhaps its well suited for larger property managers with multiple properties and a staff to maintain systems, but its just me here.

Zero SEO out of the box. They immediately try to upsell you this service through another partner when it would be so easy to just ask you for your desired search terms up front and incorporate them in the right places (every page) while they're building you the site. That would be a clear value-add from what I had before with the OwnerRez site.

There are hidden pages as part of your website that appear to exist solely to drive traffic to boostly's other services, including property management 

Why do i need a second CRM?

To be fair, I have not invested the time to play with their CRM or to implement some of their marketing and promotional strategies. I do still intend to do this to see if I can drive traffic to the site, but I feel like grass-roots campaigns/promotions with past guests is still going to be the most effective form of organic promotion. I don't think I need fancy social media AI campaigns or another $100/mo CRM to do that, but I do plan to experiment with this when I have time. 

Their support during the onboarding process was good and my questions and concerns were addressed promptly.

Their sales team is really good