Can you build a direct booking site on Lodgify? What its API lets you do
Christian, Co-founder, Fullstreak; co-owner, MINT @Naschmarkt, Vienna
Published
Yes. Lodgify's API can put a real booking into your calendar with a single request, and it gives every automatic message it sends your site its own secret code so you know it truly came from Lodgify, which is enough for a small hotel, inn or serviced apartment group to build a real direct booking checkout. It will not hold the room while the guest pays, and it does not say in readable text which plan includes API access.
Fullstreak is a done-for-you direct booking service for independent hotels and rentals. It puts your property into the answers Google and ChatGPT give, tracks every guest back to where they found you, and takes the booking on your own website, working over the property system you already run so you keep the commission the platforms take today.
At a glance
Who this is for
Operators selling the same unit on more than one channel, who have been caught out once already.
What you get
Lodgify's API creates a real booking from your own site and signs every webhook with a secret unique to that endpoint. It will not hold the unit while the guest pays, and Lodgify does not say in readable text which plan includes API access.
Two words come up constantly once a developer is involved. An API is the door a software company opens in its own system so an outside program, your website in this case, can read and write the same bookings your staff see on their screens. A webhook is a message that system sends to an address you give it the moment something changes, so your site gets told instead of having to keep asking.
What a direct booking site needs
Lodgify
Create a real reservation from your own site
Yes, one call to the booking endpoint
Hold the unit while the card clears
Not documented
Tell your site when a booking changes
Yes, webhooks for bookings, rates, availability and guest messages
How your developer gets a key
A client key from the Public API screen in your settings, sent with every request
Which plan includes it
Listed as a feature; the plan is not stated in readable text
Every row above checked on September 2026 against Lodgify's own pages.
Two things your developer will ask on day one
The first is where the key comes from. Lodgify's authorization page puts it under Settings, Public API, in your own account, with read and write permission, except for channel calls, which need a key of their own. The second is how many times a minute your site is allowed to ask Lodgify for something. Lodgify allows 600 requests a minute on the older version of the API and 750 on the newer one, and only 10 a minute on the calendar feed file, which is the limit a badly built sync runs into first.
What happens when two guests want the same last room?
Lodgify documents no hold. A hold is when the system quietly takes the unit off sale for a few minutes while a guest finishes typing in a card, so nobody else can buy the same night underneath them.
Instead, Lodgify puts the booking into your calendar before the guest has actually paid for it. Lodgify generates a payment link for a booking that already exists, and the guest pays through that. The same reference notes the link can come back refused when the amount cannot be enforced against a pending payment schedule, so your checkout needs an answer ready for the guest on the days that happens. At your size, that rarely causes a problem, except on your three busiest weekends, when two people can end up chasing the same last room at the same minute, and the second one gets a confirmed booking followed by an apology from you.
If you take the card through Lodgify Payments, the published US pricing is 2.90 percent plus 30 cents domestic and 4.40 percent plus 30 cents international, with a further 1 percent on foreign exchange and a 15 dollar fee on a dispute, checked on September 2026. Weigh that against what the platforms take from you now. Booking.com's partner page says it publishes no single commission percentage, that the fee varies by country and property type, and that you see yours only during registration.
How does your site find out a booking has changed?
Lodgify tells it. Lodgify's webhook objects page documents a booking change message that arrives carrying the booking, the guest and the current order together, and you can subscribe to four kinds of event:
a booking created, changed or cancelled
a rate change
an availability change
a guest message received
Lodgify gives each address you connect its own password, hands it over once at the moment you set it up and never again, and stamps every message with it, so your site can tell a real booking message from a forged one. What Lodgify publishes about actually getting that message to you is thinner: the same page commits to retrying a failed delivery several times with some delay between attempts, up to a current maximum of 10, and that is the whole published promise.
Webhook delivery
Lodgify
Guesty
Retries a failed delivery
Yes, several attempts, capped at 10
Yes, on a published schedule
How long that takes
Not published
Immediately, 5 seconds, 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 2 hours, 5 hours, 10 hours, then 10 hours again, about 27 hours in total
Switches a dead endpoint off
May remove endpoints that fail consistently; automatically removing one once it reports itself permanently gone is planned
Without a published retry window, nobody can tell you how long a message keeps trying, which is worth the cost of a job that reads your bookings back from Lodgify on a schedule and repairs anything the webhooks missed. I would not switch systems over that gap, and I would not sell it to you as a reason to. We wrote the same page for building on Guesty.
When your own site says you are full and you are not
On a system like this, your own booking page can end up telling a guest you are full on a night when you actually have rooms standing empty, and that is the expensive failure to watch for. You will not hear a complaint about it, because the guest who saw nothing free just books somewhere else instead.
Maxine and I run MINT @Naschmarkt, 18 serviced apartments in Vienna sold in five apartment types, and this caught us in our own calendar. Book one physical unit of a type and the whole type went dark for the night, with identical units standing empty. Five of 30 nights looked bookable before the fix; 26 of 30 after, because the calendar lumped every identical unit into one count and marked the whole apartment type unavailable the moment any single physical unit was booked. I run an agency, Ekamoira, so I already had a dev team, and they rebuilt the availability calculation over the property system rather than waiting for a vendor to change how it counts. We have written up the impact of the pooled availability fix we ran with its caveats. Lodgify says nothing about this behaviour on its own pages. Run the test below on your own booking page and find out for yourself.
The test to run this week
Find a date where one unit of a type you sell more than one of is booked and the rest are free.
Open your own booking page the way a guest would, search that date, and ask for that type.
If it comes back as unavailable, you are turning guests away on a night you have rooms for, and every night like it costs you the same way.
Should you build a direct booking site on Lodgify?
Yes, if you are on Lodgify and your plan carries API access. Make finding that out your first phone call.
Plenty of write-ups state confidently that the cheaper plans are locked out. That traces to a third party API report card citing the same pricing page we could not read, so I will not repeat it as fact. The plan names have moved as well: there is no plan called Pro any more, whatever older comparisons say.
Your property
What I would do
8 to 15 units, nearly every booking through the platforms, nobody technical on the payroll
Settle the plan question, then build one direct checkout and point your own traffic at it. The create call and the signed webhooks are enough to do it properly.
15 to 25 units, already taking some money on your own domain
Run the availability test above before you extend anything. A pooled inventory fault costs more per month than the build does.
Any size, already on Lodgify and content with it
Stay where you are. Switching platforms costs far more than fixing a website problem does.
Lodgify's API can create a reservation and signs every webhook endpoint with its own secret, which is enough to build a real direct booking checkout on. Lodgify does not publish in readable text which plan carries that API access, so keep an upgrade in the build estimate until it tells you in writing that you do not need one. We build the direct booking side over the property system you already run, usually live in three weeks, and we work with properties doing around $350,000 a year in bookings or more. Bring the system you are weighing up to the call and we will tell you what it does not cover. Book a call, twenty minutes, prepared for your property.
Questions operators ask
How much does Lodgify cost per month?
Lodgify sells four plans, Basic, Starter, Professional and Ultimate, with Basic listed at $14 a month and Starter at $24 a month on Lodgify's pricing page when we checked in September 2026. What the page does not say in readable text is which of the four includes API access, because the plan grid renders its feature marks as icons rather than words.
Does the Lodgify API let me create a reservation?
Yes. Lodgify documents a single request that creates a new booking in the system, and it can upgrade an enquiry you already hold into that booking instead of leaving you with two records. A direct booking checkout depends on exactly this: the ability to put a new reservation straight into the system on command.
Can I hold a unit on Lodgify while the guest pays?
No, not as a documented feature. Lodgify works the other way round: the booking is created first and a payment link is generated for it afterwards, which the guest pays through. For most properties that is fine, but on a sold out night it means two guests can be on the same last room at once.
Does Lodgify send a webhook when a booking changes?
Yes. Lodgify sends messages for booking changes, rate changes, availability changes and guest messages, and a booking change arrives with the booking, the guest and the current order attached. Each address you connect gets its own secret code, handed to you once when you set it up, so your site can check that a message really came from Lodgify.
Is there a Lodgify API GitHub repository or SDK?
Build from the documentation rather than hunting for a library. Lodgify's getting started page describes the public endpoints directly and states every request and response uses standard web formats, so a developer works straight against them. We could not confirm an official Lodgify maintained client library on our September 2026 check, so do not plan around one.
Is Guesty better than Lodgify?
Guesty is ahead on one specific point: it publishes an exact retry schedule for a failed message, about 27 hours before it turns off an address that keeps failing for 5 straight days, while Lodgify publishes only a cap of 10 attempts with no timing. That gap says more about how each company writes its documentation than about which system runs better. Choose on price, on the channels you sell through, and on whether your plan includes API access.
Which Lodgify plan do I need for API access?
Nobody outside Lodgify can tell you from the public pages. The pricing page lists an API endpoint as a feature but does not state in readable text which of Basic, Starter, Professional and Ultimate includes it, and the per plan marks are images rather than text. Ask Lodgify support in writing and keep the reply, because a plan upgrade is a recurring cost that belongs in the build budget.
Co-founder, Fullstreak; co-owner, MINT @Naschmarkt, Vienna
I own MINT @Naschmarkt in Vienna with Maxine, and I run Ekamoira, the agency Fullstreak came out of. Almost every booking we took arrived through the platforms, so we built the site that takes the booking, the plumbing that keeps one calendar, and the pages Google and the AI assistants quote. MINT ran it first. Fullstreak is that work, made repeatable for operators like you.
Every vendor claim traces to the vendor's own page, checked on the month shown under each table. MINT numbers come from our own books.
See where your own bookings leak.
Twenty minutes on a call. You get a read on where your bookings start today, what the platforms take, and what a direct channel would take to build. It is yours whether or not you hire us.
