Compare vacation rental marketing agencies
BuildUp Bookings alternative: Book With Haven vs BuildUp Bookings
BuildUp Bookings is a vacation rental marketing agency: a 22-person team running SEO, paid, email, and AI-search optimization under published monthly retainers from $699, with WordPress websites quoted per project. Haven is a self-serve platform that generates your branded site, checkout, guest CRM, SEO and AI-search scorecard, Blog Autopilot, ads, and loyalty from your listing — free to build, 0% commission.
Competitor facts checked
5.0on Capterra · 6 reviews, September 2026Book With Haven and BuildUp Bookings both exist to grow direct bookings for vacation rental operators. One is an agency that does the marketing for you; the other is a platform that puts the marketing tooling in your hands.
BuildUp Bookings, founded by Conrad O’Connell, is a vacation rental marketing agency with a 22-person team across client success, SEO, paid media, email, design, and development; it says it has worked with more than 300 vacation rental companies and attributes over $48 million in client bookings and leads to the last 12 months. Based on publicly available information as of October 2026, its retainers are published: Advisory from $699 a month billed quarterly, Digital Marketing Retainers from $1,500 to $5,000 a month, and a Fractional CMO from $7,500 a month, each with a one-time setup fee and 10% off annual terms. Website projects are quote-only — a WordPress build you own, in a fully custom Signature tier or a template-based Plush tier, with your booking engine of choice wired to your PMS; no PMS is named. Its services list SEO, link building, GEO and LLM optimization, agent and skill building, paid social, email, and branding, and it runs the Heads In Beds Show podcast, a book, courses, and playbooks.
Book With Haven is the direct booking platform itself. Every place you connect from Airbnb, your PMS, or an iCal feed gets its own free Haven site and a place in Haven’s plain-language AI guest search, the Haven app, and the open catalog that ChatGPT, Claude, and other assistants read — with no listing fee and no commission. Behind that site is the work an agency would otherwise bill monthly: Stripe checkout, a guest CRM with smart remarketing, digital guidebooks that capture guest emails, free screening with up to $50,000 damage protection on eligible bookings via Truvi, native upsells, turnover tasks and payouts, taxes, a 100-point SEO and AI-search scorecard, Blog Autopilot, One Click Ads, AI reels, loyalty points, and a Haven Assistant that changes your site from a sentence.
A host can use both — point a BuildUp retainer at a Haven site, or keep a BuildUp-built WordPress site and embed Haven’s booking widget. This page compares the two on the capabilities hosts ask about most, starting with the ones an agency buyer weighs first: who does the work, what it costs, and what the site itself can do.
Book With Haven vs BuildUp Bookings, at a glance
No agency retainer; the tooling is in the platform — SEO and AI-search scorecard, Blog Autopilot, One Click Ads, CRM remarketing, AI reels — and you or the Haven Assistant runs it.
A genuine strength: a 22-person team covering SEO, link building, paid social and search, email, design, and development under Digital Marketing Retainers of $1,500–$5,000 a month, with client relationships running five to six years.
Plan prices and included properties are on the pricing page; no quotes or setup fees.
Retainer bands are public — Advisory from $699/month, Digital Marketing $1,500–$5,000/month, Fractional CMO from $7,500/month, each with an unstated one-time setup fee — but website projects are scoped by quote after a call.
Haven generates a design-forward branded site from your listing in minutes and the Haven Assistant restyles it from a sentence; Haven’s team installs the booking widget on an existing site free. There is no agency design team or custom build project.
A WordPress build you own: the fully custom Signature tier (built in months) or the template-based Plush tier with your colours and fonts (built in weeks), with on-page SEO at build and your PMS booking engine wired in.
No human advisory retainer; the SEO scorecard, performance reports, and the Haven Assistant point to the next step.
Advisory from $699 a month and a Fractional CMO from $7,500 a month, led by a team that has worked with more than 300 vacation rental companies.
Built into every site: weekly checks that the crawlers behind ChatGPT search, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot, Google, and Bing can read the page, a site llms.txt, IndexNow, Foursquare listings, and visits from AI assistants tracked as their own channel — plus a listing in Haven’s open search API and MCP server that assistants query directly.
GEO and LLM optimization and “agent and skill building” are listed services with an AI-info page; delivered as agency work under a retainer.
A Help Center, Haven’s blog, and published research reports; no course, podcast, or coaching program.
A genuine strength: the Heads In Beds Show podcast, the book Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing, courses, and playbooks.
A branded site auto-generated in minutes from your Airbnb listing or PMS; publish when you are ready.
A Plush template site in weeks; a Signature custom site in months.
Connect Airbnb, your PMS, or an iCal feed and every place gets a free Haven site in Haven’s AI guest search, the Haven app, and the catalog AI assistants read. No listing fee, no commission, no guest fee — guests send booking requests, Haven emails you each one, and you pay only to accept.
No traveler-facing catalog; traffic comes from the marketing the agency runs to your site.
Your listings appear in Haven’s plain-language AI stay search and in its open search API and MCP server for ChatGPT, Claude, and other assistants — each result links travelers to book direct with you, with no commission or guest fee.
GEO and LLM optimization aims to get your own site cited by AI engines; no traveler-facing search catalog, search API, or MCP server for AI assistants is documented.
A no-code branded site per listing or multi-unit group, custom domain, and built-in Stripe checkout with instant book or request-to-book — the free Haven site becomes your direct booking site the moment you subscribe.
A WordPress site on your own domain with “your booking engine of choice wired to your PMS: live rates, live availability, secure checkout”; the checkout belongs to the PMS, not the agency.
Keep your current site and embed Haven’s booking widget (a script and one div, works in WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, or React), blog widget, or multi-unit search widget; guidebooks, CRM, screening, upsells, and taxes all work alongside it.
Marketing retainers run against the site you have; on-page SEO and conversion work on an existing site is part of the service.
No per-booking commission and no guest service fee on any plan (standard Stripe fees apply) — on bookings Haven actually processes.
No commission; the agency bills retainers and project fees, and bookings run through your PMS booking engine. The payment processor is not documented.
Search answers come from the calendar and rates you sync, checked against your own rules, and the total on the card is the total at checkout. Prices are never shown without dates.
Live rates and availability from the PMS booking engine wired into the site.
Native two-way connectors for Hospitable, Guesty, Lodgify, Hostfully, OwnerRez, and Track. Any other PMS — Hostaway, Hostex, Uplisting, Smoobu, Beds24, Avantio, Octorate, AvaiBook, Hosthub, Zeevou, Hostify, Smily (BookingSync), Elina, Resly, Homhero, Streamline, Escapia, CiiRUS, and essentially every Airbnb-connected system — syncs listing content, photos, prices, availability, and reservations through Haven’s direct Airbnb integration: the same data the PMS already publishes there. The only via-Airbnb difference: Haven bookings and manual blocks close dates via the Haven iCal feed added in the PMS, not a reservation-write API.
Sites are wired to “your PMS” through its booking engine; no PMS is named, and sync depth is not documented.
Beautiful, design-forward branded pages built to convert — no theme picker. It just works.
A WordPress site you own and can edit; design work beyond that comes through the agency.
Digital guidebooks and a mobile stay guide capture the booker’s and co-guests’ emails into a built-in guest CRM with smart remarketing — local-event, gap-night, price-drop, and listing-updated campaigns.
Email marketing is an agency service; no guest CRM, guidebook, or automated remarketing product is documented.
Free guest screenings on every plan, plus optional Screen & Protect damage protection of up to $50,000 on eligible bookings via Truvi ($8 per booked night, paid by the guest at checkout or by the host).
Not documented; handled by your PMS or third parties.
Guest identity verification, a rental agreement with digital signatures, and security deposit holds or charges, all run from the booking.
Not documented; handled by the connected PMS.
Lodging taxes itemized on every booking and aggregated for filing, taxes shown before checkout, and a guest display currency picker.
Not documented; handled by the PMS booking engine.
Create and sell your own experiences and add-ons with 0% Haven commission — quantities with real inventory, time slots and event seats, party-size pricing, deposits, and quote requests — sold pre-booking, at checkout, and in the guest guide. AI-assisted setup and import from any website included.
No guidebook or upsell product; add-ons depend on the PMS booking engine.
Turnover cleans and upsell jobs become tasks automatically, offered to your own cleaners and chefs by SMS, WhatsApp, or email — Y/N/DONE replies, a no-login job page, photo proof, backup escalation, and Stripe payouts.
No operations tooling documented.
Per-stay door codes and climate automation from the booking, with the code delivered through the guest guide.
Not documented.
One grounded assistant on every property site, multi-unit site, guidebook, and custom domain (private stay details only after booking). Every reply graded, gaps grouped into insights with cited chats, one-click Add context fixes it across all sites; hosts train it by chatting with their own sites.
Agent and skill building is listed as a service; a guest-facing chatbot on the booking site with reply grading or chat insights is not documented.
Opt-in loyalty points on every direct booking, spendable at any of your listings and applied automatically at checkout; four automatic rewards emails (points ready, reminder, expiring soon, last call) with the bookings they bring back; optional inactivity expiry with guest protections; and one program across teammates’ or agency clients’ listings, funded so their payouts stay whole. Included on every plan.
Not documented.
A 100-point SEO and AI-search score for every site with a checklist sorted by points gained, live Google Search Console and Bing data, weekly checks that the crawlers behind Google, Bing and Copilot, ChatGPT search, Claude, and Perplexity can read the page, a site llms.txt, IndexNow, image and Vacation Rentals sitemaps, Foursquare listings, and visits from AI assistants tracked as their own channel.
SEO, link building through its TLCK framework, and GEO are agency services delivered by people; a self-serve scorecard, Search Console data, or automated crawler checks are not documented.
A blog on every site, plus Blog Autopilot: on a weekly to monthly schedule Haven runs a real research pass — the queries people search about your area, the pages that rank and what they miss — reads the organiser, park, venue, and tourism-board pages it will cite, writes only from those verified facts and your listing, has an editor check every claim, and drafts the post for your review or publishes it with a Sources list, sitemap entry, and IndexNow ping. Keeping your own website? Embed the same blog with a two-line widget.
Content is written by the team under a retainer on a WordPress blog; no automated research or scheduled posting is documented.
AI social reels built from your own listing photos, clips and guest reviews, with a storyboard you approve before anything is spent; narrated property stories read by natural ElevenLabs voices; and custom one-minute instrumental soundtracks composed from the property’s photos, likely guests, location and brand. Download-ready MP4s for Instagram, Facebook and Meta ads.
No built-in tool for turning listing photos into social reels with voiceover or generated music is documented; paid social is an agency service.
One Click Ads: Haven writes short-term-rental-tuned Google Search and ChatGPT ads, you set the daily budget, and Haven runs them for you (Meta rolling out) — no agency retainer.
Paid search and paid social are run by its paid-media team under a retainer, on top of the ad spend.
A visits-to-booking conversion funnel with traffic-source attribution, plus first-party session replay with rage/dead-click detection.
Promises “results, not fancy-looking meaningless reports”; no analytics dashboard, funnel, or session replay is documented.
Import reviews from OwnerRez, Airbnb, Vrbo, or a file, collect testimonials, and link a Google Business Profile so guests are asked for reviews that show on your site.
Reviews can be placed on a WordPress build; no review import or collection product is documented.
Haven Communities: shared regional pages that list member stays and exchange reciprocal backlinks with your site.
Link building is an agency service under its TLCK framework; no community page program is documented.
Discount codes, weekly and monthly, early-bird, last-minute and direct-booking discounts with a “Saving $X booking direct” pill; branded e-gift cards sold in the guidebook and redeemed at checkout; stay credits instead of refunds.
Not documented; promotions depend on the PMS booking engine.
Revenue, occupancy, ADR and RevPAR against last year, booking pace, pricing health, gap and orphan nights, booking sources, a report builder with CSV exports, and a weekly digest.
Results are reported by the client-success team; the reporting cadence and any dashboard are not documented.
Localized pages in up to 5 languages with per-language URLs and hreflang for structured indexing.
Not documented.
Multi-unit and brand sites with room types and property profile pages, custom domains, and professional email on your domain.
A WordPress site on your own domain; professional email is not documented.
Partner mode: manage clients’ listings and sites from one console, with client billing and a shared or separate PMS connection.
Serves management companies as clients; a client console is not documented.
PriceLabs dynamic pricing integration plus a Calendar AI assistant that changes rates, minimum stays, and blocks from a plain-language request.
Rates and calendars live in your PMS.
The Haven Assistant, pinned to every page of your dashboard, changes your sites and settings from a plain-language request — pages, copy, design, photos, domains, listings, rates and calendar, upsells, guest CRM and remarketing, and email settings — and you approve each change before it ships; for anything it does not change directly, it walks you there step by step. Or connect ChatGPT or Claude through Haven’s MCP server and work from there.
Not documented; changes go through the agency or your own WordPress editing.
Haven’s phone web app — bookwithhaven.com on a phone, added to the home screen, with nothing to install from an app store — runs the same plain-language stay search on the same API as bookwithhaven.com/stays.
Not documented.
Free to be listed and free to build your site for as long as you like; pay only when you publish or accept a booking request.
Retainers from $699 a month billed quarterly with a one-time setup fee; website projects are quoted. No free tier or trial is documented.
Choose Haven if…
- You want the marketing done by software you own — an SEO and AI-search scorecard, Blog Autopilot, One Click Ads on Google and ChatGPT, CRM remarketing, and AI reels — rather than a $1,500–$5,000-a-month retainer.
- You want the site, checkout, and 0% commission generated from your listing in minutes, with no quoted project fee.
- You want guidebooks, a guest CRM, screening with damage protection, rental agreements, deposits, taxes, upsells, tasks, and loyalty points in the same place as the booking site.
- You want to be found in Haven’s AI guest search, the Haven app, and by ChatGPT and Claude — free — on top of your own domain.
- You want your PMS to sync natively or through Airbnb without an agency in the middle.
- You want to change your site and settings yourself, or by telling the Haven Assistant what you want.
Consider BuildUp Bookings if…
- You want a team of specialists running SEO, link building, paid media, and email for you, and a $1,500–$7,500-a-month retainer is within budget.
- You want a human strategist or fractional CMO who has worked with hundreds of vacation rental companies.
- You value published retainer bands, long client tenures, and the education — podcast, book, courses — that comes with the agency.
- You want a fully custom WordPress site you own, built and maintained by an agency, with your PMS booking engine wired in.
Haven vs BuildUp Bookings
Frequently asked questions
Build your direct booking site free
Configure your Haven site as long as you like — you only pay when you’re ready to publish and take bookings. No per-booking commissions.
Comparison based on publicly available information about BuildUp Bookings as of October 2026. Product features and pricing change frequently — check BuildUp Bookings’s public website for their latest details. BuildUp Bookings is a trademark of its respective owner; this page is not affiliated with or endorsed by BuildUp Bookings.