Common questions from owners

No. If you already have a website, you can embed the 1Melo booking widget into it, and you control which sites are allowed to embed it. If you do not have a website, you can publish a Direct Listing for each property and share its 1Melo URL with guests. Both options use the same availability, pricing, booking settings and direct-booking flow.

A Direct Listing is a public property page hosted by 1Melo. You add a headline, description, photos and amenities, and 1Melo fills in the property facts and builds the booking calendar into the page for you. Publishing it gives you a direct-booking URL to share, without building a separate website.

A calendar showing only genuinely open dates, an itemised quote covering nightly rates, fees and taxes, your rental terms if you publish any, and a confirmation page and email afterwards. The calendar never explains why a date is unavailable.

Yes. You can enter a booking yourself and record that it came by phone or was arranged another way. It runs through the same availability and pricing checks, so it cannot create a conflict.

Yes, per property, and it is optional. If you publish terms, a guest must accept them to book, and the exact wording they accepted is stored with that reservation — so revising your template later never changes what a past guest agreed to.

A marketplace booking usually carries marketplace fees on your side, the guest's side or both. A direct booking has no marketplace commission in the middle — what remains are your payment provider's processing fees and whatever your own channel costs to run. We will not pretend the rest is free; it is simply yours to manage.

You do. For a direct booking, the cancellation terms, refund rules and rental agreement a guest sees are the ones you publish, and the exact wording they accepted is stored with the reservation. Refunds are actions you take under your own policy, not outcomes decided for you by a marketplace.

1Melo is not a marketplace and does not arbitrate between you and your guest. A direct booking is governed by the terms you published and the guest accepted — which is why acceptance is recorded word for word. Payment disputes and chargebacks are still handled under the rules of the payment provider, card issuer or bank involved; no booking software changes that.

Yes, and most owners should. 1Melo is built to sit alongside the marketplaces rather than replace them. You keep listing wherever you like and gain a direct channel plus one view of the availability behind all of it.

No — 1Melo works with or without them, and it is designed to sit alongside them rather than replace them. The marketplaces can keep bringing you new guests, while 1Melo gives you a direct channel for the guests who find you elsewhere or come back later.

Yes, and they are the easiest direct bookings you will ever take. A guest who has already stayed with you does not need to be found or convinced — they need a way to find you again. Make your booking page easy to reach through your own channels — your website, your social profiles, materials at the property — and follow each marketplace's communication and off-platform policies for guests who booked through that platform.

Through iCal, the standard calendar feed every major platform publishes. You paste each listing’s feed address into 1Melo, and you add 1Melo’s own outbound feed to each platform. There is no API integration and no partnership with any marketplace.

No, and no iCal-based tool is. iCal is polled: each platform fetches the other on its own schedule, so changes travel in minutes to hours. 1Melo re-checks availability inside the booking transaction, so a direct booking cannot conflict with anything it can already see.

Direct bookings, imported calendar events and manual blocks, each as a plain reserved block. It contains no guest name, email, phone number, price, confirmation number or internal note, and it never says why a date is taken.

Yes, immediately, and they drop out of the next feed fetch. The reservation record itself is kept rather than deleted.

Yes — owner stays, maintenance or anything else, with a private note for yourself. Those blocks hold the dates on your booking page and are published on your outbound feed.

Yes, where you have connected a PayPal business account. Payment is completed on PayPal, so card details never reach 1Melo, and the amount and currency are verified against the booking total before anything is marked paid.

No. You can take bookings without online payment and settle however you do today. Payment collection is something you switch on per business, not a requirement.

Yes, in full or in part, from the booking’s payment record. Refunding and cancelling are separate deliberate actions — refunding does not cancel a booking, and cancelling does not automatically refund.

PayPal today. The schema is provider-generic, but PayPal is the only provider currently implemented, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.

Every direct booking opens a message thread automatically, so you can send arrival instructions before a guest writes to you. They reply on a secure page of their own, with no account or password needed.

No. Guest messaging covers direct bookings made through 1Melo. Marketplace conversations stay in the marketplace — there is no message integration with any platform.

Yes. There are fixed roles — owner, admin, manager and staff — and each sees only what the role allows. Permissions are enforced on the server, not merely hidden in the interface, and there is an audit history of who changed what.

No. Setting up a property is filling in forms — details, stay rules and rates. Connecting a calendar is pasting an address. Embedding the booking form is copying one snippet into a page you already have.

Create your account at 1melo.com/app/signup — enter your name and email, verify the address, and you can be setting up your business and first property in minutes. There is nothing to install and no card details are needed to start.

1Melo is free for the first 30 days for up to two properties. After the trial, the first two properties are $59 per month. Each additional property is $45 per month. 1Melo does not charge a per-booking fee or take a percentage of your reservation value. Payment-provider processing fees are separate.

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