How LODGEA is revolutionizing hospitality with direct booking websites
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Empower anyone to set up a direct booking site in just a few minutes
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Fully integrated website builder and booking engine
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At least 30% increase in direct bookings for their customers
LODGEA GmbH is an all-in-one SaaS solution for anyone that markets, promotes, and sells short-term rental properties–from hotels to campsites and everything in between. Based in Germany and serving a global market, LODGEA recently partnered with Duda to bring to life a solution for property managers to set up their very own high-performing direct booking sites in just a few minutes.
Ricarda Kies, CEO and Co-Founder of LODGEA, shares insights into how the partnership between Duda and LODGEA is reshaping travel and hospitality.
An opportunity to transform short-term rental bookings
For anyone listing short-term vacation rentals, maintaining high occupancy rates is crucial to maximizing revenue and sustaining their businesses. In the past, this meant relying heavily on online travel agencies (OTAs) to get in front of travelers and secure bookings.
A 20-year veteran of the hospitality industry, Kies and co-founder and CTO, Jan Kammerath, recognized the challenges of depending on OTAs for bookings. For one, these platforms command steep affiliate commissions, eating into profit margins. OTAs also offer limited ability to customize the content or optimize the SEO of the listing, making it more challenging for property managers to control their customer experiences.
Kies and Kammerath understood how important it was for property managers to be able to have their own high-performing direct booking platform and take control of the content and search visibility of their properties. Kies and Kammerath saw a gap in the market. Sure, there were website builders, and there were booking engines. But there wasn’t a seamless, all-in-one solution that combined both of these tools together in a user-friendly way.
That’s why Kies and Kammerath started LODGEA in 2021. They set out to create a game-changing property booking engine and marketing platform that would simplify online travel and make travel ecommerce accessible to any business, large or small.
Direct booking engine meets website builder
A tech-savvy team, LODGEA started out by building their own integrated direct booking and marketing engine for short-term rentals. However, they found that the platform wasn’t easy enough for their end customers to use and update on their own.
While supporting their first customers, the team at LODGEA quickly learned that their tool needed to be a lot more flexible and easy-to-use to empower their customers to take full advantage of the potential. They realized they needed to partner with the right website builder to fully bring their vision of an all-in-one solution to life.
Duda was the perfect match - a complementary tool that would take their customer experience to the next level. Duda was the only website builder that met LODGEA’s requirements: a flexible, easy-to-use platform that aligned with LODGEA’s vision.
LODGEA was able to seamlessly integrate Duda’s white label website builder with their booking engine and marketing tools, making it incredibly easy for their customers to build and maintain high-performing direct booking sites on their own.
“Duda was groundbreaking for us,” said Kies, “With Duda, we are able to grow together to build an even better solution. It’s a lot more than just a technical partnership.”
Today, LODGEA is a complete, end-to-end marketing, web building, and direct booking solution for anyone that manages short term rental properties.
How it works
With the Duda platform fully integrated into LODGEA’s technology, property managers can now easily launch robust direct booking websites in just a few minutes - no programming or technical knowledge required.
The sites are SEO-friendly, responsive, GDPR-compliant, and easy to maintain out-of-the-box. Plus, LODGEA’s customers can easily update and optimize their sites post-launch to continuously improve their content, messaging, and search visibility.
Property managers can directly connect to their existing property management system, so everything stays in sync at all times. LODGEA is able to offer its direct booking website builder in 79 languages and 49 different currencies to effectively serve the global hospitality market.
The solution also offers full flexibility and a smooth booking and payment process that enables anyone in hospitality to increase direct bookings and reduce their dependence on OTAs.
Driving the hospitality industry forward, together
LODGEA’s success with Duda marks a significant leap forward in providing an integrated, efficient, and user-friendly direct booking platform for the hospitality industry. While the website builder only recently launched in September 2023, customers are already sharing positive feedback, and LODGEA saw an immediate uptick in conversions from free trials.
One customer shared their enthusiasm for the new product:
“We’ve been using LODGEA for about 2 years, and we love the new format with its preset templates and drag-and-drop widgets. Managing pages and adding widgets is easy for our mulit-faceted serviced accommodations business. With LODGEA templates, we’ve created a great landing page that directs different types of guests to the properties they want to book.
This has been a game changer for us…it has made building our bespoke website so much easier.” - George, Infinity Apartments
“This product is a disruptive one, so it takes time,” said Kies, “But it’s been great to see the first results of our fantastic collaboration with Duda!”
