Bookings and messages from your website

Guests book and pay directly on your website: the money goes to your own Stripe account and Nowistay takes no commission. Each booking appears in Nowistay like any other direct booking, marked as booked on your website. Questions sent through the contact form reach you by e-mail and are listed in the editor under Enquiries.

How a guest books on your website

The booking calendar appears in three places on your site:

• on each property page, in the “Availability and booking” section (the “See availability” button scrolls down to it);
• on your properties page, where guests search all your properties by dates;
• in any Booking block you added to a page (see Website blocks: every block explained).

What the guest does:

1. Picks the dates and the number of guests. The calendar applies your rules, such as the minimum stay and the days when arrival is allowed.
2. Sees the price details: nights, cleaning fee, discount, taxes and total. With split payment, the amount due now and the amount due later are shown separately.
3. Fills in their details: name, e-mail, phone, address and any special request. The dates are held for 30 minutes.
4. Clicks “Book & Pay” with the amount. A secure card payment page opens in the whole browser window.
5. After paying, the guest comes back to your site on the booking confirmation page: “Booking confirmed!”, their name, the amounts paid and, for a split payment, the date of the second payment. A confirmation e-mail follows.

If the guest leaves the payment page without paying, they come back to the booking section of the property page and nothing is booked.

The confirmation page is the Thank you page of your site: you can change its text in the editor like any other page (see Website pages). Once your site has been published, the booking calendar uses your website’s colours and fonts.

Payment: your Stripe account, no commission

• Payments go to the Stripe account connected for direct booking. Nowistay takes no commission on these bookings; only Stripe’s usual card fees apply. Your website costs a flat €19 per month.
• Guests pay by card.
• Full or split payment follows your direct booking settings, the same ones as for the booking widget: go to Integrations, open Direct Booking, click the settings icon (gear), then choose the Payment mode: Full payment or Split payment. With split payment you set the percentage paid at booking (10% to 90%) and how many days before arrival the rest is charged automatically (1 to 60). Click Save settings.
• If a guest books so close to arrival that the second payment date has already passed, they pay the full amount at booking.
• The taxes (such as the tourist tax) and the discounts you set for direct booking apply too.

All these settings are explained in How to add a direct booking widget to your website.

Example: you rent a seaside apartment in Biarritz and use split payment: 30% at booking, the rest 14 days before arrival. A guest books 7 nights in August for €1,260 in total. They pay €378 on your site, and the remaining €882 is charged to their card automatically 14 days before arrival. Both payments go straight to your Stripe account.

Where the booking appears in Nowistay

A paid booking from your website is a confirmed booking, handled like any other direct booking: you find it in Bookings and in your calendar.

Open the booking to see its Payment section:

• Payment status, for example Paid;
• Booked on: Your website, with a link to the website it came from.

Paid bookings from your website are also counted in the website statistics.

Prices on your pages and prices in the booking calendar

Your pages show a starting price, such as “From €95 a night”, with “plus cleaning fee (€60) and tourist tax” underneath. It appears on property pages and property cards, and in the main banner if you chose to show it. This starting price is the lowest nightly price over the next 90 days. It doesn’t take the minimum stay into account, so it is a guide, not a quote.

Example: in September you lower your October prices. The booking calendar shows the new prices at once. The “From” price on your pages follows at your next publish. See Publish your website and put changes online.

The contact form

Visitors who have a question before booking can write to you with the contact form. Your About page has one from the start, and you can add a Contact form block to any page. You can change the form’s title and introduction; the fields themselves are always the same.

The visitor fills in:

• Your name and Your e-mail (required);
• Phone (optional);
• Which property? (only when your site has several properties);
• Arrival (optional), Departure (optional) and Guests;
• Your message (required, up to 5,000 characters).

They click Send and see Message sent, with a line saying that your website received the message and will reply by e-mail.

The form has built-in spam protection: an automatic check runs before each message is sent. One visitor can send up to 5 messages per hour, and your site receives up to 100 messages per day.

The form works in your private preview too, as long as the website is in your subscription: send yourself a test message before you publish.

Where contact form messages arrive

Each message reaches you in three ways:

1. By e-mail, at the e-mail address you use to sign in to Nowistay (not the contact e-mail shown on your site). The subject starts with “New message from your website” and the e-mail contains the message, the property, the dates, the number of guests and the visitor’s details. Click reply in your mailbox: your answer goes straight to the visitor. This e-mail is always sent, even if you turned off website notifications.
2. By push notification on your phone, if your notification settings allow it.
3. In the editor: open the … menu and choose Enquiries. You see your 100 most recent messages, each with the name, date, property, stay dates, number of guests and message. Reply opens a new e-mail to the visitor, and a phone number, when given, can be tapped to call. The “View the enquiry” link in the e-mail opens this list directly.

The AI co-host doesn’t read or answer contact form messages: you reply yourself.

Visitors can also write directly to the contact e-mail shown on your site, in the footer and on property pages under “A question before you book?”. Those e-mails go straight to that address and don’t appear in Enquiries. You set that address in Site settings (see Website settings).

Example: you manage 12 apartments in Lisbon. The site’s contact e-mail is your team’s shared bookings mailbox, but you sign in to Nowistay with your own address. Contact form messages land in your own inbox, while direct e-mails go to the team mailbox. To keep everything in one place, set up a forwarding rule in your own mailbox, or check Enquiries every day.