Booking Engine Guide

The Booking Engine is a public page for your property where the guest looks at the free dates, picks a room and books. A booking that comes from here never goes through a portal, so it never pays a portal's commission.

The default address is vezpa.it/prenota/your-address. You reach it in the app under «Configuration» → «Booking Engine», and the setup page has four tabs: «Property Settings», «Booking Engine languages», «Payment» and «Types in the Booking Engine».

What the guest does

On a single page they choose the dates and how many units they need, up to five, with the guests in each. Prices appear right below: for every available unit, one line for each meal plan you offer (room only, breakfast, half or full board) with the price of the unit with that meal plan for the whole stay and its own «Book» button. Under the lines they read how payment works — payment at booking, a deposit, a card guarantee or payment at the property — as you set it in the «Payment» tab. There they also see the mandatory extras and any automatic charges, which are added up in the summary before paying. Automatic charges are counted for each unit booked, when the unit's price exceeds their threshold; the extras chosen do not trigger it. They are set up in the catalogue. The tourist tax, if there is one, is shown separately and is included neither in the line price nor in the total paid on the site. It is paid at the property, unless you have switched on «Include taxes in online payments» under «Tax & legal compliance» → «Taxes»: then it is collected through the Stripe payment links, and the summary no longer asks the guest to pay it after check-in. With a card guarantee, when arrival is so close that the charge day has already come, they read that cancellation is no longer free. Units that are not available stay at the bottom, greyed out, with the reason written (full, minimum stay, too many guests, no price) and a «See available dates» button that opens that unit's calendar with the full nights marked. The same calendar opens when they press «Book» before choosing dates. If fewer units are free than requested, the site says so and suggests the first dates when all of them are. Beyond five we invite them to write to you. If they have already chosen a unit and start a new search, the site warns them and asks them to confirm, because the new search removes what they had chosen from the booking. Once the dates are chosen, the property's main photo, gallery and amenities make way for the results, which move to the top of the page.

If the property is run as apartments or houses rather than a hotel, the site talks about accommodations and not about rooms, in every language: that is what the guest is actually booking.

Who can touch this page

Property setup is reserved to whoever may configure the property: the director and the assistant. An observer or a housekeeper cannot change it. With one exception: «Site appearance» — colours, fonts and «Why book direct» — can be changed only by the director (the Manager role in the app); for everyone else the button is greyed out.

There is nothing to ask us for: the setup page is available straight away, and until you publish no guest sees anything. You can leave it half done and come back whenever you like.

1. Fill in «Page title» and the descriptive text, upload the photos, write the arrival information
2. In the «Types in the Booking Engine» tab make at least one room visible: right after the initial setup they are all created excluded, and while they stay that way anyone opening your page finds nothing to book
3. Check the address under «Site URL»: it is already there, derived from the page title, and you change it with the pencil
4. Tap «Publish»: from that moment guests can book

The address is the only thing that is required

Publishing is refused only when the address is missing: without one the page would answer at no link at all. You will find it already written, and «Edit URL» changes it: lowercase letters, digits and hyphens only, at least three characters, and it has to be free. A few words are reserved by Vezpa and are refused.

The warnings before publishing do not stop you

Before you publish, the app lists what is missing: no room on sale, online payment not set up, no photos, no descriptions. They are warnings, not conditions: if you want to publish with few photos, you publish. The first two, though, mean you are not selling, and they are worth closing first.

Connecting Stripe is not needed to publish, and nobody asks you for it first. It is needed to take money online, and the moment your settings ask for a deposit or a security deposit it becomes indispensable: the guest reaches the end of the booking, cannot pay, and no booking is created at all. Since the deposit starts at 100%, that is exactly what a brand new setup looks like.

You have two ways out, and they are equivalent: connect Stripe, or bring both the deposit and the security deposit to zero and collect on arrival. Either one makes the pre-publish warning go away.

Connecting Stripe

1. In the payments tab, in the «Online payments» panel, tap «Configure Stripe»: the Stripe site opens, with the property’s name and website already filled in by Vezpa
2. Fill in what Stripe asks for: personal details, IBAN, identity document. These are real data, and Stripe verifies them
3. Come back to the app: the panel refreshes on its own, and the «Verify configuration» icon reloads it straight away. If Stripe still needs something, the panel lists it with the date by which to complete it: tap «Complete Onboarding» and pick up where you left off
4. When the panel says «Online payments active», online payment is live

The guests' money lands in the account you gave Stripe, not with us. Vezpa keeps 0.5% of what you collect online, worked out on the amount actually charged: on a 30% deposit it is 0.5% of that 30%, not of the stay. The cost of the card payment itself is set by Stripe and differs from country to country: you will find it on their price list.

The three ways of collecting

• Everything up front — the guest pays for the whole stay when they book. This is the standard: «Deposit required (%)» starts at 100
• A deposit — bring that percentage below 100 and the guest pays only that share; the rest is settled before arrival
• Nothing online — deposit and security deposit at zero: the guest books without paying and you collect on arrival. In this case you do not need Stripe

What the guest reads at the top

• «Page title» — the property name as guests read it
• «Link description» — 240 characters at most, one for each language enabled on the Booking Engine. It is not only for search engines: it is also the subtitle the guest reads on the site home page, under the property name. Each guest sees it in their own language; if that one is empty it falls back to English and then to the base text, and if they are all empty the subtitle does not appear at all
• «Site URL» — the public address, read-only until you tap «Edit URL»
• «Visible address» and «Google Maps link» — where you are and how to get there
• The register code — where your country keeps a register of properties (CIN in Italy, RNAL in Portugal, a registration number in France, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium) the field appears here, and it is required to save this page: the site prints it in the open. If you manage apartments the code does not belong to the property but to each individual unit, and it goes in its card under «Types»: a unit with no code is not published, the others stay online

The languages of the site

In the «Booking Engine languages» tab you choose which languages the site speaks: up to twenty-two. The language of the property's country is always on and cannot be switched off — you will spot it by the padlock. For every language you switch on, you are asked for the link description and the arrival information; a language left empty falls back to English, and then to the base text.

The arrival information

Under «Arrival Information», in the same tab as the languages, you write what the guest finds again in the booking confirmation: check-in and check-out times, how to reach you, where to collect the keys, the notes that matter. The WiFi network name and its password live there too, and they are the same for every language.

The four numbers that decide the money

Three of them are in the «Payment» tab. The first one, the notice, sits instead next to the arrival information, in the languages tab: look for it there.

• Minimum notice (days) — how much notice a booking needs. 0 = you take bookings even for today. «Same-day bookings until»: After this time, guests booking today can only arrive from tomorrow. Booking Engine only: OTA channels have their own setting.
• Days for payment — 14 by default. They are not counted from the booking, but backwards from check-in. Inside that threshold the site demands the full amount and the booking stops being refundable; outside it, the guest can still cancel and get their money back
• Deposit required (%) — 100 by default, that is the whole stay paid straight away. A lower value collects only that share at booking time, and the rest before arrival
• Security deposit — the damage guarantee: the card stays on file and you charge it only if you have to. 0 = no security deposit

Amenities tell the guest what they'll find: in the room (TV, Wi-Fi, fridge, hairdryer, kitchen) and in the property (parking, lift, swimming pool, breakfast).

Room amenities are set in the room configuration, in the Amenities panel under the characteristics. If you work by room type, you set them on the type and they propagate to the rooms that belong to it. Property amenities are set once on the Booking Engine page and do not need repeating on every room.

The entries in our catalogue have their own icon and arrive already translated into every language of your Booking Engine. If something is missing, the Manager can add an entry of their own: you can give it an icon too, chosen from all the ones available, and the same icon can go on as many entries as you like. You write the entry in the languages you sell in. An entry without a translation still shows, in the text you wrote, so it doesn't disappear without you noticing.

The guest sees them on the Booking Engine: room amenities on the room's card, both when choosing among the available units and on the property page; property amenities above the list of accommodations.

The «Types in the Booking Engine» tab decides what the site sells. For a hotel the settings apply to the whole type: every double will carry the same description and the same photos. For whoever runs houses and apartments, each unit has its own.

• «Visible in Booking Engine» — the switch that puts a room on show, or keeps it out without deleting it
• «Description» — the name and the text of the room, one for each language you switched on
• The options — cot, accessibility, pets, third bed, separable beds, view. Here you only read them: you switch them on in «Room Setup», not from this page
• The photos — the ones a guest looks at while choosing where to sleep

Accessibility, and why it starts off

When the accessibility option is on, the site shows the guest a «Disabled access» box they can tick, and the request reaches the booking. Rooms created from September 2026 start with the option off: declaring accessibility on a public page is regulated ground, and it has to be your own choice. Older ones may have it on from before, so they are worth checking one by one.

Extras and the SPA

After choosing all the units, the guest reaches the «Customise your stay» step: for each unit they see the extras they can add as cards, with the photo, the icon or nothing, as you decided, and with the description in their language; mandatory extras appear as «Included» and are already shown in the list next to the unit, because a cost that cannot be removed must be seen before choosing. If your SPA is active and you sell products or treatments on the site, they appear in the same step too, with the same payment rules as before. The total updates as they choose; then «Continue» leads to the guest details. If there is nothing to offer, the step does not appear. The extras are the catalogue items with «Booking Engine» switched on, in the order you chose there; the ones bought go into the booking's stay bill as separate lines, each with its own VAT. The «SPA and shop» section stays at the bottom of the page with a link to the SPA and, if enabled, to the shop; when the Booking Engine is embedded in your website, those links open in a new tab.

The photos, and where they are uploaded

The «Images» block holds the logo — which appears in the site header only if you switch on «Show logo on site» — and the «Promotional image», which comes out at the bottom of the page under the rooms. Below them you find shortcuts to every gallery: the property's own and one per room, each with its name and how many photos it already holds. Tap a row to open it and add or reorder photos; the count updates when you come back.

From «Site appearance», in the first tab, you open the panel that dresses your site. Whatever you leave alone stays as it is: until you change something yourself, the page does not move by a pixel.

Only the director can change this panel. Other roles see the «Site appearance» button greyed out, with the line «Only the Manager can change the site appearance.»: colours, fonts and the reasons to book direct stay as the director set them.

• «Preview» — at the top, and it shows you straight away the button that takes the money
• «Ready-made palettes» — one tap and the colours fall into place together; then you adjust them one at a time. They change neither the fonts nor the corners
• «Colours» — one at a time, in hex. Every field shows «Restore the default value» as soon as you touch it
• «Fonts and shape» — the heading font, the body font and the corner rounding
• «Why book direct» — one reason per line, in every language of the site. They appear on the landing page; the guest reads their own language, with English as the fallback

Your site answers at vezpa.it/prenota/your-address. You can attach a «Custom domain» to it — yourhotel.com, say — and do it yourself, without waiting for anyone. You buy the domain from a registrar: we do not sell it, we connect it and we keep its certificate. From our side it carries no extra cost.

How to type the address

Type the address however it comes to you: with www., with https://, with a trailing slash. We always connect the base address — for example www.yoursite.com becomes yoursite.com — and we tell you before going ahead. If the address is a top-level one — like yoursite.com — we also connect the www. version and you don't need to do anything else; if instead you connect a subdomain — like booking.yoursite.com — we publish only that one.

If that address is already taken

Before connecting we check where your address points today. If it already points to another server — for example because you already have a site there — we stop and tell you: connecting it to Vezpa would make that site unreachable. We suggest a free address to use instead, usually booking.yoursite.com, so your site stays where it is and bookings live right next to it. If you want to go ahead anyway, the «Connect it anyway» button is right there.

You buy the domain yourself

Vezpa doesn't sell domains. If you don't have one yet, buy it from a registrar and come back here to connect it: we attach it and take care of the security certificate.

1. Tap «Connect domain» and type the address however it comes to you — we take care of the rest
2. Vezpa shows you the DNS records to copy into the registrar's panel, with ready-made guides for the most common registrars
3. Save the records at the registrar, then come back here and tap «Check now»
4. As soon as the DNS points at us, the HTTPS certificate is issued and the domain goes active

The card at the top always says where you are: «Waiting for DNS», «Issuing SSL...», «Active», «Error» with its reason, or no domain configured at all. With «Remove» you go back to the address on vezpa.it and can attach a different one: remember afterwards to update the links you had already shared.

Sharing the link

In «Configuration» the Booking Engine card carries two buttons: «Copy link», which puts it on the clipboard, and «Share», which opens the device's sharing menu. Use that link and not one you typed yourself: the server composes it, and it accounts for your own domain when there is one.

How the guest declares children

In the guest panel, under the «Children» counter, a numbered drop-down appears for each child, with «Under 1 year» as the first entry. It is not up to whoever books to know your thresholds: they declare the age, and our server works out the bracket.

The drop-down reaches the highest threshold among the rooms the site shows, and each type then prices with its own: an age that still counts as youth on one room can count as an adult on another, and the price the guest sees already accounts for the room they are looking at. If no room on show has a children bracket, neither the counter nor the drop-down appears at all.

The bookings that come in

• They show up in the calendar with the «Booking Engine» channel, like any other booking
• You get a notification on your phone for every one of them
• The guest gets the confirmation by email, with the arrival information in the language they booked in

Fixing something

The settings can be changed whenever you like, and with «Save» the site shows them at once. If the check-in times or the way guests get in change, update the arrival information: that text ends up in the guest's confirmation, and an old confirmation sends them to the wrong doorbell.