Esho Stays

The challenge

Esho Stays lets serviced apartments to three audiences that want completely different things: holidaymakers booking a few nights, contractors needing somewhere for months, and landlords looking for someone to run their property for them. Meanwhile the business itself runs on Guesty — availability, pricing and payment all live there, not in WordPress. A site like this fails in one of two ways: either it becomes a brochure that dumps people onto an unrelated booking platform, or someone tries to rebuild the booking engine inside WordPress and spends the next year keeping two calendars in sync. Feenix Digital supplied the UI; my job was to build it and to make the seam between site and booking platform disappear.

The approach

I modelled properties as their own custom post type with ACF fields for the details that vary unit to unit, so everything editorial about a listing stays editable in WordPress while availability and payment stay in Guesty where they belong — one source of truth each, no synchronising. Each property then hands off to its own Guesty booking page rather than a generic form, so a guest goes from browsing to a live calendar in a single step. On top of that I wired the routes people actually use when they have a question: a WhatsApp channel and a chatbot that fields booking queries, so an enquiry never depends on someone being willing to fill in a form.

What changed

• 01Properties modelled as a custom post type with ACF fields, editable without touching the booking platform
• 02Guesty integrated so every listing hands off to its own live availability and payment page
• 03One source of truth each — content in WordPress, availability in Guesty, nothing synchronised by hand
• 04WhatsApp and chatbot routes added for guests who would rather ask than fill in a form
• 05Three audiences — guests, contractors and landlords — each given their own path through the site