Short answer: BookingSync rebranded as Smily. The vacation rental platform, your account and its API carry on under the new name. For your website, the main opportunity is the API: it lets a custom site show your rentals, rates and availability as real pages on your own domain, which is the strongest setup for SEO and AI search.

If you’ve used BookingSync for a while, you’ve probably noticed the name Smily everywhere. The rebrand doesn’t change how you manage rentals, but it’s a good moment to look at whether your website is making the most of the platform.

What changed, and what didn’t

  • Changed: the brand name, website and marketing. You’ll see “Smily (formerly BookingSync)” in many places.
  • Didn’t change: the underlying platform for managing rentals, channels and bookings, and the API that integrations rely on.

If your website mentions “BookingSync”, it’s fine to update it to “Smily”. Guests don’t see your PMS name, so this mainly matters for your own materials.

Your website options with Smily

  1. Smily’s own website tools. Quick to set up, with your rentals and booking flow connected.
  2. A custom website on the API. Your rentals, photos, amenities, rates and availability are read from the API and displayed on your own pages, with bookings sent back to Smily.

Why an API-based site is so strong for SEO

With widget-based booking systems, most listing content is loaded from the PMS and search engines barely see it. With an API, the site can render every rental as real HTML on your domain:

  • One URL per rental, with its own title, headings and description.
  • Schema generated from the same data the page shows, so facts always match.
  • Area pages that group rentals by destination.
  • Updates in Smily flow through without editing the site.

Multilingual sites done right

Many Smily users rent to guests from several countries. A multilingual site should have:

  • A separate URL for each language version of a page.
  • hreflang tags linking the versions together.
  • One canonical version per language, rather than duplicated listings.
  • Translated titles, descriptions and alt text, not just body text.

Speed with large portfolios

Calling the API on every page view would be slow. A good build caches API data for a short time, so pages load fast while availability stays accurate, and the final price is always confirmed at checkout.

Migrating an older site

If your current site dates from the BookingSync days, map its URLs to the new pages and set up redirects before switching over, so you keep the search visibility you’ve built.

See how I build custom websites for Smily (BookingSync), or compare every PMS integration.