Home→Setup Guide

Getting Started with BookingBench

Welcome to BookingBench!

The goal of this knowledge base is to get you up and running as quickly as possible. To get the most out of your Booking Bench experience you will need to have the following items ready to go:

Pre-requisites:

  1. A custom URL domain: If you don't have this, Booking Bench is not going to help you as all booking sites, advertising and search engines are reliant on a custom URL to serve your webpage to guests. This is an easy step. Find yourself a custom domain and buy it over at: https://www.cloudflare.com/

  2. Branding: You will be uploading your logos, setting your brand colors and taglines up front to configure your owner site. Since guests tend to be wary about trusting their credit cards to an unbranded website, we highly recommend getting your logos and brand identity created before launching your site.

  3. Activate your PMS's direct booking feature: BookingBench handles your property search and listing pages, but routes guests to your PMS's native checkout to complete their booking and process payment. This keeps payment handling within your PMS where your rates, policies, and guest data already live. It also adds a layer of security as a guest credit card number never gets handled by the BookingBench service. Because of this it's required for BookingBench to function. Make sure the following is active before going live:

Note: Why go with BookingBench if your PMS has a default webpage? Default PMS sites are built with almost no SEO signals — no structured data, no proper page titles, no content that search engines can use to understand what you offer. If you've run one of these sites for any period of time, you already know: they don't rank. Scoring on the first page of Google is what drives organic traffic, and a default PMS site almost never gets there. That's a dead channel!

  1. Google Search Console Property: If you don't already have a GSC property, create your site through BookingBench first, get your URL pointing to the site, then go to https://search.google.com/search-console, add your site URL as a property, and verify you own it using Google's standard verification process. (DNS record, HTML file, or meta tag) Google will have more information on this in their site.

Optional Pre-requisites:

  1. Social media links: We put these on all your webpages so your guests can build a relationship with you, instead of an OTA.

  2. Google Business Profile: Linking this with our service helps build trust with Google, improving your website's standing in search results.

With the above items, we can move forward and get you set up so you're making direct bookings.

Step 1: Accept Your Invite

Check your email for an invitation from BookingBench. Click the link, set your password, and log in to your owner portal. If you don't see it, check your spam folder or contact support.

Step 2: Connect Your PMS

Go to PMS Keys in the left sidebar. Select your property management system and enter your API credentials.

  • Hostaway: Find your Account ID and API Key under Settings → API in your Hostaway dashboard
  • Guesty: Generate an API key under Integrations → API Keys in Guesty
  • OwnerRez: Find your API credentials under Tools → API Access in OwnerRez
  • Lodgify: Generate a key under Settings → Integrations in Lodgify

Click Save & Test Connection. A green confirmation means your properties are ready to sync.

Step 3: Choose Which Properties to Show

Go to Properties in the sidebar. You'll see a list of everything pulled from your PMS. Check the properties you want displayed on your site and click Save Selection. You can change this at any time.

Step 4: Configure Your Website

The left sidebar organizes settings into collapsible groups. Two are worth completing before you go live: Website and Homepage. The Sites item you'll also see is for owners managing multiple independent sites — skip it for now.

Website → Site Settings

Click Website in the sidebar to expand it, then click Site Settings.

Logos — The page has three upload slots:

  • Banner Logo — appears in the top navigation bar on your site
  • General Logo — used in footers, emails, and other contexts
  • Menu Icon — small icon shown in the mobile nav trigger

Click Choose File next to each slot, select your image, and it uploads automatically. A preview appears once uploaded.

Colors — Scroll down to the color palette. Each color has a swatch you can click to open a color picker, a hex field for pasting an exact value, and an opacity slider. The groups are:

  • Brand Colors — primary, secondary, and accent (drives buttons, links, highlights)
  • Page & Layout — page background, card surfaces, body text
  • Navigation & Footer — header and footer bar colors
  • Buttons — primary and secondary button colors

Font — Choose from the font family dropdown or upload a custom font file.

Contact Information — Fill in your business address, phone number, email, and emergency contact. These appear in your site footer and Terms page.

Click Save Settings at the bottom when done.

Homepage → Hero & Branding

Click Homepage in the sidebar to expand it, then click Hero & Branding.

Hero image or video — Click Upload Video to set a background video for your homepage hero section, or leave it empty to use the background image set in Site Settings. Adjust the Overlay Opacity slider to control how much the image or video is darkened behind your text.

Taglines — Click Add Tagline to create a headline and subline that rotate across your hero. Each tagline has its own text, color, and font size. Use the fade and hold timing controls to adjust how long each tagline displays.

CTA Button — Enter a label (e.g. "Browse Properties") in the CTA Label field. Toggle Show CTA to control whether the button appears at all.

Social Links — Add your Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok URLs. These appear in your site footer.

Google Business Profile — Paste your GBP URL to connect your site to your Google Knowledge Graph entry.

OG Image — Upload a sharing image (1200×630 recommended) that appears when someone shares your site link on social media.

Click Save when done.

Homepage → Layout

Click Homepage in the sidebar, then click Layout. This is where you control which sections appear on your homepage and in what order.

Each section appears as a card with two controls on the right:

  • ▲ / ▼ arrows (left side of the card) — drag the section up or down to reorder it on your page
  • Eye icon (right side of the card) — click to hide or show the section. Hidden sections are greyed out and won't appear on your live site

The sections you can reorder and toggle are: Hero, Trust Bar, Intro Text, Testimonials, Gallery Widget, Featured Widget, Meet the Team, and Press & Awards.

For the Gallery and Featured widgets, there's an additional toggle — Inline or Overlay. Inline places the widget in the normal page flow at its current position. Overlay floats it on top of another section at coordinates you set in the widget settings.

Desktop and Mobile layouts are configured independently. By default, mobile inherits the desktop layout. Click the Mobile tab and then Enable Mobile Layout if you want to show a different order or hide specific sections on small screens.

Click Save Layout when done.

Remaining Sections

The sections under Website (About Us, FAQs, Terms & Conditions) and Homepage (Testimonials, Meet the Team, Press & Awards) can be filled in over time. Your site goes live without them, but they build guest trust and improve search visibility.

Custom domain: Pointing your own domain (e.g. book.yourcompany.com) to your BookingBench site is handled by the BookingBench team during onboarding. Reach out and we'll walk you through the DNS steps for your registrar.

Step 5: Set Up Your Widgets

Go to Widgets to get your embed codes. There are four widget types:

  • Gallery — a photo carousel for your homepage
  • Featured Listings — highlights your top properties
  • Navigation Menu — a booking-ready nav bar
  • Booking Engine — the full search-and-book interface

Copy the snippet for each widget you want and paste it into your existing website before the closing </body> tag.

Step 6: Invite Your Team

Go to Team to add anyone else who should have access to your portal — co-managers, assistants, or a bookkeeper. Enter their email address and assign a role. They'll receive their own invite.

Step 7: Connect Google Search Console (optional but recommended)

Prerequisites: GSC requires a custom domain (e.g. book.yourcompany.com) — sites hosted at yourname.bookingbench.com cannot be verified in Google Search Console because you don't own that domain. If you don't have a custom domain yet, skip this step and revisit it after your domain is set up.

If you do have a custom domain, you'll need to verify it in Google Search Console first before connecting it here. Go to search.google.com/search-console, add your site as a property, and complete Google's verification process (they'll give you a DNS record or HTML file to add to your domain). This step happens entirely outside of BookingBench.

Once your site is verified in GSC under your Google account, come back to the portal:

  1. Go to Website → Site Settings and scroll to the Google Search Console section
  2. Enter your GSC site URL — either sc-domain:yoursite.com (recommended, covers all subdomains) or https://yoursite.com/ (exact URL match)
  3. Click Connect Google Search Console and sign in with the Google account that has access to that GSC property
  4. Grant access — BookingBench will pull your search performance data monthly from that point forward

Step 8: Enable Google Vacation Rentals (optional — Hostaway users only)

Google Vacation Rentals (GVR) is a free organic listing feed that puts your properties directly in Google Search results when someone searches for vacation rentals in your area. It is separate from paid Google Ads and costs nothing beyond your existing Hostaway subscription.

To enable it, log in to your Hostaway dashboard and go to Channels → Google Vacation Rentals and follow the activation steps. Once enabled, Hostaway automatically pushes your listings and availability to Google's feed. There is no configuration needed inside BookingBench — it works through your PMS connection.

Note: GVR requires your listings to have complete descriptions, photos, and accurate availability. Gaps in any of these will cause listings to be filtered out of the feed.

If you run into troubles, we're here to help support you. Contact us at support@bookingbench.com and we will respond within 1-2 business days.

If you would like hands on help setting up your site, we will soon be offering a service to help you get your site operating without you touching a computer!

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