Compare direct booking website agencies
Hudson Creative Studio alternative: Book With Haven vs Hudson
Hudson Creative Studio is a New Orleans design agency that builds custom WordPress direct booking sites around its own HomeRunner booking engine, for a project fee plus monthly hosting and engine fees. 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 Hudson Creative Studio both exist to move vacation rental bookings off the marketplaces and onto a site you own. One is a boutique agency with a booking engine; the other is a platform you run yourself.
Hudson Creative Studio, founded in New Orleans in 2021, builds custom WordPress direct booking websites for vacation rental operators and sells its own HomeRunner booking engine underneath them. Based on publicly available information as of October 2026, it publishes three website packages — Lite from $5,500, Pro from $7,500, and Custom from $10,000 — plus $100 a month for hosting and maintenance, and HomeRunner is priced flat and commission-free per website, from $45 a month for up to 5 listings to $885 for up to 300. HomeRunner connects to Guesty, Hostaway, Hostfully, Hospitable, OwnerRez, Lodgify, Streamline, Track, and Boom, though its own feature table shows on-site checkout for Hostfully, Guesty, Hostaway, Streamline, and Track only; on OwnerRez, Lodgify, Hospitable, and Boom the guest finishes the booking on the PMS’s own booking site. The studio says SEO, SEM, and marketing are not offered in-house and recommends outside experts, guidebooks come through a Hostfully Guidebooks subscription, and guest marketing runs through a SendSquared add-on. Its sites are credited with serving more than 2,500 properties across 10 countries.
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 everything an agency would otherwise refer out: Stripe checkout on every connection, 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 — keep a Hudson-built site and embed Haven’s booking widget, or point Hudson’s design work at a Haven site. This page compares the two on the capabilities hosts ask about most, starting with the ones an agency buyer weighs first: design, price, and what happens after launch.
Book With Haven vs Hudson Creative Studio, at a glance
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 bespoke branding project or agency design team.
A genuine strength: founder-led custom WordPress design, with Lite as a pre-made layout, Pro with flexible layouts and property grouping, and Custom as a fully bespoke, branding-intensive build where you work directly with the CEO.
Plan prices and included properties are on the pricing page; no quotes, setup fees, or project fees.
A genuine strength among agencies: website packages from $5,500, $7,500, and $10,000, $100/month hosting, and a per-listing HomeRunner price list are all public. Retainer hours, the deposit amount, and the Conversion Kit add-on price are not published.
Checkout is part of every plan at no extra charge, with no per-booking commission.
HomeRunner is priced flat per website and never a percentage: $45/month for up to 5 listings rising to $885/month for up to 300, with no fees until the site is live and no contracts.
Haven runs Stripe checkout on the booking site for every connection — native connectors and via-Airbnb alike — so the guest never leaves your domain to pay.
HomeRunner’s own feature-support table shows on-site checkout for Hostfully, Guesty, Hostaway, Streamline, and Track; on OwnerRez, Lodgify, Hospitable, and Boom the guest completes the booking on the PMS’s booking site.
A branded site auto-generated in minutes from your Airbnb listing or PMS; publish when you are ready.
Lite about 2 weeks, Pro 5–7 weeks, and an overall timeline of 4–8 weeks or longer through discovery, agreement, staging, revisions, and launch.
Hosting, SSL, updates, and backups are part of the plan; there is no separate hosting or maintenance fee.
Hosting and technical maintenance are a separate $100/month (cloud hosting, caching, SSL, backups, updates, licence management) on a WordPress site on your own domain; minor content changes are free and larger work uses retainer hours. What happens to the site if HomeRunner is cancelled is not documented.
The marketing stack is in the platform: an SEO and AI-search scorecard, Blog Autopilot, One Click Ads, a guest CRM with smart remarketing, and AI reels — no outside experts needed.
The studio states that SEO, SEM, and marketing are not offered in-house and recommends outside experts; email marketing runs through a SendSquared integration sold with the paid HomeRunner Conversion Kit.
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 to the site the studio builds for you.
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.
HomeRunner markets “AI Ready” pages built for AI search and agents and an on-site AI search that turns natural-language queries into filters; 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 custom WordPress site on your own domain with HomeRunner search, property pages, live quotes with extras and fees, an availability calendar, and on-page checkout where the PMS supports it; confirmed reservations are written back to the PMS.
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.
HomeRunner can be added to an existing WordPress site through a plugin and shortcodes, and is now sold for Squarespace, Webflow, Wix, and custom-coded sites.
No per-booking commission and no guest service fee on any plan (standard Stripe fees apply) — on bookings Haven actually processes.
HomeRunner takes no cut of bookings and its fee is never a percentage; payment-gateway fees apply.
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 quotes with extras and fees and an availability calendar from the connected PMS; most PMSs sync by webhook almost immediately, while Streamline and Track refresh on a schedule of up to 60 minutes.
Stripe checkout on every plan.
Stripe, PayPal, Square, Mollie, and Authorize.Net, plus Klarna and Affirm for buy-now-pay-later, where the PMS supports on-site payment; the host’s own Stripe account is documented.
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.
HomeRunner connects to Guesty, Hostaway, Hostfully, Hospitable, OwnerRez, Lodgify, Streamline, Track, and Boom, with depth that varies by PMS: reviews import, upsells, and coupons are each supported on only some of them.
Beautiful, design-forward branded pages built to convert — no theme picker. It just works.
Design is the studio’s strength, but changes beyond minor content edits go back to the agency through retainer hours rather than a self-serve editor.
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.
A Local Area Guide section pulls from a separate Hostfully Guidebooks subscription; guest marketing and abandoned-cart recovery run through SendSquared via the paid Conversion Kit. No CRM of its own 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.
Fees and taxes come through the PMS quote; no currency switching is documented.
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.
HomeRunner quotes extras and fees at booking time, with upsells supported on Hostfully, Guesty, Hostaway, and Streamline only; no inventory, time slots, party-size pricing, or quote requests documented.
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.
HomeRunner lists an AI Concierge that answers guest questions on the site, and the studio integrates “any bot of your choice”; reply grading, chat insights, or cross-site fixes are 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.
Loyalty was discussed as a tactic on a 2024 podcast appearance; no loyalty product is 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.
HomeRunner markets SEO-ready pages, IndexNow and Schema Health toolkit modules, and an “AI Ready” feature; the studio itself does not offer SEO and refers it out. No scorecard, Search Console data, or crawler checks 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.
A WordPress site can carry a blog and HomeRunner’s Toolkit lists blog-related modules; no content service or automated posting is documented, and the studio’s own site has no blog.
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.
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.
SEM is referred to outside experts; the build sets up Google Tag Manager and the Facebook Pixel for campaigns you run elsewhere.
A visits-to-booking conversion funnel with traffic-source attribution, plus first-party session replay with rage/dead-click detection.
Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Facebook Pixel, and lead or conversion reports are set up as part of the build; no reporting dashboard 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.
A custom Reviews widget on Pro and above pulls PMS reviews where the PMS supports it (Hostfully, Guesty, Hostaway, OwnerRez, Boom); aggregated OTA reviews reportedly need a separately purchased Revyoos plugin.
Haven Communities: shared regional pages that list member stays and exchange reciprocal backlinks with your site.
Not 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.
Coupons are supported on Guesty, Hostaway, OwnerRez, Lodgify, and Hospitable connections only; gift cards and stay credits are not documented.
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.
No reporting dashboard documented; HomeRunner lists an “Operations & Data” capability without detail.
Localized pages in up to 5 languages with per-language URLs and hreflang for structured indexing.
Not documented as a feature; the only mention is a help article on translation plugins breaking booking-widget assets.
Multi-unit and brand sites with room types and property profile pages, custom domains, and professional email on your domain.
Client sites run on their own domains with property grouping on Pro and above and room-based hospitality tiers in HomeRunner; 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.
HomeRunner runs an agency partner programme and a “Hire an Expert” directory; a client console with client billing 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 the connected 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 beyond minor content edits go through the agency.
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.
A project fee from $5,500 (payable over up to four months at no extra charge) before launch, then $100/month hosting plus the HomeRunner fee; HomeRunner itself offers a 14-day free trial and a 30% launch discount for the first 3 months.
Choose Haven if…
- You want the site, checkout, and 0% commission without a four- or five-figure project fee, and to be live in minutes rather than weeks.
- You want on-site checkout on every PMS connection, not only the ones an engine’s feature table happens to cover.
- You want SEO, AI-search readiness, Blog Autopilot, One Click Ads on Google and ChatGPT, email remarketing, and AI reels built in instead of referred out to other vendors.
- You want guidebooks, a guest CRM, screening with damage protection, rental agreements, deposits, taxes, upsells, 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 to change your site and settings yourself, or by telling the Haven Assistant what you want, with no retainer hours.
Consider Hudson Creative Studio if…
- You want a bespoke, founder-led design and branding project rather than a generated site you refine yourself.
- You value published project pricing and a flat, commission-free booking engine from an agency, and the budget for a $5,500–$10,000+ build plus monthly fees is comfortable.
- You run Hostfully, Guesty, Hostaway, Streamline, or Track and want a WordPress site with HomeRunner’s on-site checkout wired to that PMS.
- You want a wider choice of payment gateways, including PayPal, Square, Mollie, Authorize.Net, and buy-now-pay-later.
Haven vs Hudson Creative Studio
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 Hudson Creative Studio as of October 2026. Product features and pricing change frequently — check Hudson Creative Studio’s public website for their latest details. Hudson Creative Studio is a trademark of its respective owner; this page is not affiliated with or endorsed by Hudson Creative Studio.