iGMS will build and run your direct booking site, and take 4% of what it books

iGMS has started selling the work, not just the software. Its September release notes, published on 6 October, introduce a Direct Booking Service: the iGMS team builds and runs your direct booking website, sets up your domain and your Stripe payments, and publishes your listings on Google.

The pricing is the news. There is no setup fee and no monthly fee. A 4% commission applies only to reservations booked and paid through that direct booking website.

It is available on all plans, which is unusual for a service offering of this kind. Most PMS vendors put done-for-you website work behind an enterprise tier or hand it to an agency partner.

How the 4% actually lands

Run the comparison properly before you decide this is cheap.

Against the OTAs it plainly is. A booking that would have come through Airbnb or Booking.com at 15% or more arrives here at 4% plus card costs. If this service shifts real volume off the OTAs, the arithmetic works on its own.

Against your existing direct channel it is a new cost. Most operators running their own site pay a hosting bill and roughly 3% to a payment processor, and keep the rest. Adding 4% on top means direct bookings stop being the cheapest money you take. For a manager already converting well on their own site, this is a worse deal than what they have.

So the honest framing is that iGMS is pricing against doing nothing. The operators this suits are the ones whose direct site does not exist, or exists and does not convert, and who are not going to fix that themselves. For them, no fixed cost and a share of the upside is a reasonable trade, and iGMS only earns if the site books.

What you give up is control. The site is built and run by iGMS, on your domain, with Stripe as the processor. Nothing in the entry says what happens to the site if you leave, or whether you can take the build with you. Worth asking before you point your domain at it.

The Google piece also needs a question. "Publishes your listings on Google" most likely means Google's vacation rental listings, but iGMS does not name the programme, and the economics of free booking links and paid placement are not the same thing. Ask which one you are getting.

Also in this release, for anyone building on the API

Two additions that connected developers should know about. Reservation responses and webhooks from the iGMS API now include a JSON breakdown of guest numbers, split into children, infants and pets. And custom fee values now come through the v2/get-direct-booking-content endpoint.

Both are additive rather than breaking, so nothing forces an immediate change. But if you have been inferring guest composition from a single headcount, or hard-coding fees on a direct booking front end, you can now read both properly.

Smaller changes worth knowing

The AI Agent gained a per-reservation off switch, so you can disable it for a specific period inside one booking, and you can now choose whether a delayed AI draft gets cancelled or still sent. That is a useful piece of control on an assistant that writes to guests.

Owner statement summaries were redesigned to show rental income, included fees and taxes, management commission, expenses and amounts due to manager and owner, with rental income due to the owner separated from net income due to the owner. Reports and the dashboard now read property business model settings instead of the old contract settings.

Dtravel reservations can now be imported through a connected iCal feed.