Cloudbeds: booking that stays on your site through payment

Cloudbeds says it’s built for hotels, multi-property groups, hostels, short-term rentals, and B&Bs and inns of all sizes.

1. 01

   Immersive Experience 2.0

   A loader script in your page’s head and a small tag where you want booking to appear. Guests search, pick a room and pay without leaving your site. You list up to five domains it can run on. It depends on your Cloudbeds subscription.

2. 02

   Booking engine widgets and buttons

   Date pickers and book buttons you add to your pages, including stacked, horizontal and floating versions. Some are premium, depending on your plan.

3. 03

   Your own search with a link

   Cloudbeds documents check-in, check-out and guest parameters for its booking engine link, so your own search bar can hand off to it.

The hosted booking engine lives at hotels.cloudbeds.com/reservation/ followed by your property code. Cloudbeds doesn’t document running it on your own domain. With Immersive Experience 2.0, booking happens on your own pages instead, which keeps the guest and your analytics on your domain.

Cloudbeds documents checkin and checkout (YYYY-MM-DD), adults, kids and currency. You can also add a room type or promo code after a hash.

API. Properties can create their own API keys, included or extra depending on the package. The API can check rates and create a reservation, but Cloudbeds says it doesn’t process card payments through the API.

Payments. Cloudbeds Payments is included on all plans.

Cloudbeds lists connections to big travel sites, vacation rental sites, outdoor and camping sites and Google.

Big travel sites

• Booking.com
• Expedia

Vacation rental sites

• Airbnb
• Vrbo

Outdoor and camping

• Hipcamp

Google

• Google Hotel Search

Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, Expedia and Hipcamp are listed as API connections. Cloudbeds says vacation rentals aren’t eligible for Google’s free booking links, since they can’t have a Google Business Profile.

If your plan includes it, use Immersive Experience 2.0. Keeping the whole booking on your own site is better for the guest and for your analytics. If not, build your own search and send guests to the booking engine with their dates filled in.

Either way, your own pages are what Google and AI tools read and recommend, so that's where the work pays off. I build direct booking websites around the booking software you already have, and I can move a site out of your booking software, redirecting every old page so your rankings carry over.