Haven Communities

A Haven Community is a shared, region-scoped page where independent operators list their direct-booking properties side by side — a small, fee-free "mini-OTA" for your area. Guests browse every member property on one page and book directly with each operator on that operator's own site. There are no listing fees, no membership fees, and no commissions.

You manage communities from Host Dashboard → Communities (/host?tab=communities).

Why join a community

A shared discovery page for your area. Guests who find the community page see every member property in one place and click through to book with each host directly.
Reciprocal backlinks that compound. The community page links out to every member's own site, and members link back to the community. Each new member strengthens local search presence for everyone on the page.
You keep your own brand. Your properties stay on your own site and domain. A community is a discovery channel and a source of search authority — it never replaces your brand or sits between you and the guest.
The right guest for each property. Guests compare stays across the region and pick the one that fits their trip, so members complement each other instead of competing for the same click.

How a community goes live

A community page has two states:

Recruiting (not yet public). While a community has fewer than five approved, publicly visible listings, it stays in host-recruiting mode and is not indexed by search engines. Members can join and prepare their listings during this stage.
Live. Once the community reaches five approved listings whose properties are currently published, the page goes live with its guest-facing layout and starts building search presence for the region.

A listing counts toward the live page only while its community submission is approved and the underlying property is publicly visible (published, not archived or hidden). If you unpublish or archive a property, it drops off the community page immediately and the community's live count updates to match — there is no stale listing left behind.

Request a community for your area

If there is no community for your region yet, request one from Host Dashboard → Communities. Use the Request a new community section to tell Haven about your area. Haven provisions the community page, and you can begin inviting local operators once it exists.

Join a community

From the Communities tab you'll see communities near you. To join:

Request to join. Add a short note about your property when you request membership. A community admin reviews the request and approves or declines it.
Accept an invite. If an admin sends you an invite link, opening it takes you straight to the community's join step in your dashboard.

Once you're a member, choose which of your properties appear on the page. Each listing you submit is reviewed by a community admin before it shows publicly, and you can hide one of your listings at any time.

How listings are ordered

By default, community listings use a neutral daily rotation by host, so no single operator is permanently at the top — the order shifts each day. Community admins can also curate a fixed order when they want a specific arrangement.

Roles

Communities have three roles:

Owner — the founding/anchor host account for the community.
Admin — reviews membership requests and listing submissions, curates the page, and manages members.
Member — lists their properties on the page.

Admins keep the page representative of the area by approving members and listings and removing anything that no longer fits.

Partners accepting clients

The Communities tab lists two kinds of page you can be on, because to a host looking for somewhere to be listed they are the same decision:

Communities near you — the regional pages above. Free to join once an admin approves you.
Partners accepting clients — property managers, co-hosts and agencies who market their own portfolio and take on owners. Joining one is not free: each card names what that partner charges, whether that is a share of bookings made through them, a monthly fee, or a one-time setup fee. Choosing Join through them opens that partner's own signup, where you see their terms and agree to the fees before anything is set up. A partner you already run through, or your own partner, shows the card without a join button.

Which partners appear is Haven's decision, not an open directory.

Custom domains

A community can optionally run on its own custom domain. When one is attached and active, it becomes the community's canonical address; otherwise the community lives at bookwithhaven.com/communities/{name}.

If you are a community Owner or Admin, the community appears in your own domain picker under "Communities you run" (Settings → Domains), so you can buy or point a name at it yourself.

Communities on Haven's guest search

A live community also appears as a card in its own row on bookwithhaven.com/stays, under the group sites row, cycling photos and video from member listings. That is another route for guests to reach the page, and another internal link to it.

Guests following your listings

Guests browsing Haven can follow a listing, a group site, or a community. Following is not the same as the heart, which only saves a stay privately: a guest who follows has asked to hear from you, and when they tick the email box they land in your contacts as an opted-in subscriber, tagged with what they followed (for example follow:community:cape-ann).

You can build an automation on it: in Marketing → Campaigns, the Followed you trigger fires when a guest follows one of your listings, group sites or communities, and you can narrow it to a single place by tag. A guest who follows without ticking the box is still visible in your contacts, but you may not send them marketing — only stay and transactional email.