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
My experience with Boostly was not good. It was so bad that I switched back to my OwnerRez hosted website. If you are thinking of going with Boostly there are a few things you need to be aware of.
(1) Cost: $4,000 for onboarding + $800 per year for the subscription fee. If you choose to pay the subscription fee monthly, then it’s going to be $97/month. Heads up — you will be pressured into paying the $4,000 fee before your initial call meeting ends.
(2) Boostly guarantees they will get you to 65% direct-bookings within 12 months or you will get your money back. It sounds great, but this is also entirely contingent upon you following their “roadmap to success”, which requires you to use their CRM (it doesn’t work — see below), use all of their campaigns, set up all of their funnels, and you have to watch all of their training videos too (they keep track of your progress). What this means is the $4,000 fee is pretty much nonrefundable. Once you pay it, you should just plan on never getting it back.
(3) They are going to build you a nice looking website, however be aware that it will have ZERO search engine optimization, and you are not going to find that out until after your website goes live. To get your website optimized, you either have to do it yourself or go with Boostly’s recommended SEO provider, which will cost you another $2,800 per year. Again, this will not be explained to you until it’s too late. So the total true cost of Boostly (if you want your website to be seen) is $4,000 for onboarding + $3,600 each year going forward.
(4) The nice looking website that you receive is built with Wordpress. This was my first experience with Wordpress. If you’ve never used Wordpress before, the back-end is like learning a whole new language. It’s overwhelming. To be sure, your website will NOT run on autopilot. You will have to perform regular maintenance on your website so you need to learn how Wordpress works, and you need to learn it fast. Wordpress runs on plugins, which are basically like apps on your phone, and they need regular updating. Updating plugins isn’t that difficult, however on occasion, updating a certain plugin will crash your site. It’s inevitable. Then you have to contact Boostly support to get your website back up and running. Plan on Boostly support getting back to you in about 1 or 2 days, which isn’t terrible, however if your website is down and you’re waiting for help, this will feel like an eternity.
(5) Paul’s comments in this chat regarding low integration with OwnerRez are exactly right. Other than the booking engine and reviews, there’s really no other integration. So let’s say you update a handful of photos and change some descriptions for one of your properties in OwnerRez. Those updates will flow to all of your OTA’s that you use, however you have to go into the back-end of your Wordpress dashboard and make all those updates in there too, if you want your website to match. Otherwise your website will not update. If you’re ok with this, then there’s no issue here. However, I just don’t need more stuff to do.
(6) Their “CRM” which comes with the website, is basically a command center/dashboard which is supposed to control (and automate) all of your email marketing, social media, and blogging. It sounds awesome and honestly it was the biggest selling point for me. However it doesn’t work. I wouldn’t even call it a beta test phase, but it doesn’t even have basic functionality. It took over 2 months for them to get my email working, however I didn’t get a chance to verify that it works because I didn’t have any contacts loaded into my CRM. I am integrated with StayFi. I was lead to believe from the start that Boostly is integrated with StayFi so my assumption was that contacts would flow from StayFi into my CRM automatically. That is not the case at all. The only way of importing contacts is for you to do it manually. If you are like me and gain new email address daily, this is about as stone-age as it gets in this industry. It was also very confusing. Since I was lead to believe this was going to be an automated process, I asked several times if it was possible for my contacts from StayFi to flow into my CRM automatically and no one from Boostly would answer me. This went on for literally weeks. After pressing them relentlessly on this, they finally admitted the only way for this to work was for me to pay for yet another subscription with a separate 3rd party service. That was the final straw for me. After 2 months of battling I finally threw in the towel. The CRM dashboard is also supposed to come pre-loaded with google analytics charts so that you can monitor your website traffic, however that never worked either. Their CRM is a total brick.
In summary, Boostly WAY OVER promises, and WAY UNDER delivers. They are not upfront about anything. I got pressured to pay a lot of money up front for a website + CRM, and all I got was a website with no SEO. They refunded me $800 for the subscription fee but are refusing to refund me for the $4,000 onboarding fee because I gave up too soon and did not follow their “roadmap to success”. But I couldn’t! Their stuff doesn’t work! So I just lost $4,000. Do not use Boostly. Spend your money somewhere else. Anyone in the OwnerRez community is welcome to reach out to me with questions.
