The year the commission became a salary
⚠️ An illustrative scenario, not a customer. Vyrobel is new and has no published customer stories yet. This describes how the product is used by an operation of this shape, composed from onboarding conversations. Nothing here is a claim about a real business, and no figure is a measured result.
Two people, eighteen apartments, and an annual OTA bill that was larger than what either of them took home.
Before: profitable on paper, thin in the bank
Occupancy was good. Reviews were good. Almost everything arrived through two marketplaces, and the commission on that volume was the single largest line in the business after the mortgage. They had a website; it had photographs and a contact form, and it converted approximately nobody.
The reason was not mysterious. A guest who found the apartments on a marketplace, liked them, and searched the name landed on a page that asked them to send an email and wait. The marketplace had a button. The button won every time.
The switch, and what came with it
Eighteen units and no separate owners is about as simple as a migration gets: twelve days, mostly spent on rate plans and photographing the apartments properly for the storefront. The booking engine went live on their own domain in week two, running from the same calendar as the marketplaces.
The listings stayed. That was the part they had to be argued into and the part that made the year work: the marketplaces kept finding new guests, and the storefront stopped those guests paying a toll on their second visit.
Contactless arrival came along almost by accident. Online check-in with ID capture, a door code released the afternoon before, and wifi details in the same place meant the two of them stopped driving across the city to hand over keys.
After: the same guests, a different door
More of the same nights arrived through their own booking page instead of a marketplace. Total volume did not fall; the listings kept doing what listings do. What changed is which channel the repeat business came through, and repeat business at these apartments is a large share of the year.
The second effect was time. Contactless arrival removed most of the evening driving, and guests who could see their door code without asking stopped messaging at eleven at night to ask for it.
What was harder than expected
Direct bookings arrive without a marketplace's dispute process behind them, which means a chargeback is now their problem. It happened once, over a cancellation the guest claimed they had made and had not. They won it because the policy was on the booking page and the confirmation email, but it was an uncomfortable fortnight and it changed how carefully they write those two things.
Photography also cost more than the software did in the first year. A storefront is only as convincing as its pictures, and theirs were marketplace-grade rather than good.