Our story

It started with a bubbleon a hill.

We built a bubble stay out on a bush ridge: post holes, bearers, the whole platform. The build turned out to be the easy part. Running it across three booking sites was the hard part, and nothing on the market was made for one host with one property. So we built the thing we couldn't buy.

The finished bubble stay on the ridge: a peach inflatable pod with a clear dome, looking out over forested ranges under a cloudy sky.

A timber platform being framed on a cleared bush ridge at sunset, with a person working on the frame and ranges in the distance. — 01 Bearers going down on the ridge, the evening before the deck was laid. **This is the build that turned into Host Port.**

The build was the easy part.

We wanted to put a bubble stay on a piece of bush. Our weekends went into getting it up: clearing, post holes, bearers, the platform you can see going down here.

Then we went live. Not on one site, but on a few, because that's how you fill a place nobody has heard of yet. And that's when it stopped being fun. Two calendars to keep honest by hand, messages arriving in different apps, and the constant low-grade dread of taking the same weekend twice.

So we went looking for a channel manager to pull it into one place. Everything we found was built for hotels and priced like it: annual contracts, per-seat fees, a percentage of every booking, and onboarding that assumed we had staff. The ones that weren't were missing the platforms we were actually on.

We had one property. We needed one screen. Nothing on the market wanted that customer.

So we built the thing we couldn't buy, and then found out how many other small Airbnb owners had gone looking for the same thing, priced it, and quietly gone back to their spreadsheet.

The dome has been up on that ridge a while now. It takes bookings from Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo and Agoda, and straight off its own page with no commission on top, and every one of them lands on a single screen. That's the whole idea, and it started with our own place on a hill.

The Host Port team

How it ended up

Then it became somewhere you could actually stay.

Same ridge, same view off the edge of it. A lot of weekends between these two photos.

A transparent geodesic dome part-inflated on the finished timber deck, still partly in its wrapping, under heavy cloud with bushland falling away behind it. — 02 The dome going up over the deck, still half in its wrapping.

Inside the finished dome at sunset: a made bed with checked bedding, two armchairs and a side table, looking out through the clear wall to ranges and a pink and gold sky. — 03 **Made up, listed and taking bookings.** Everything Host Port does exists so this part stays the fun part.

How Host Port was born

So we wrote down what it actually had to do.

Not a feature list. Four things, taken straight off a bad week of running one small place across more booking sites than anyone wants to hold in their head.

01
Every channel's calendar, one calendar
A night sold on Airbnb has to close itself on Booking.com, Vrbo and Agoda. Nobody should be copying dates between browser tabs at eleven at night.
02
Every channel's messages, one inbox
One thread per guest, whichever platform they arrived on, and a reply goes back out the same way it came in, without you picking the app.
03
It has to catch itself when it slips
The fast path is a webhook. Behind it sits a two-minute sweep, a fifteen-minute reconcile and a nightly full resync, because "usually instant" is not the same thing as "never wrong".
04
It has to be priced like one property
Ten dollars a listing, no commission, and seats for a cleaner or a co-host at no charge. A hotel budget was never going to be the answer.

Everything in, one place to look, and it goes back out the way it came.

Before three tabs, none of them talking

MTWTFSS

Airbnb

Sofia +2

Booking

still bookable

Vrbo

still bookable

One booking, and the same three nights are still on sale in two other places. That is the phone call nobody wants to make.

After one calendar, every channel on it

MTWTFSS

Host Port

Sofia +2

Booking closedVrbo closedAgoda closed

Sold once, shut everywhere, usually inside a minute, then swept again at two minutes, fifteen, and once more overnight. That backstop is the actual product.

We had one property and needed one screen. Nobody was building for hosts like us.

Why Host Port exists

What we believe

Four things we won't compromise on.

Every decision we make runs through these. They're the reasons we started, and the reasons hosts stay.

Affordable, always

A flat $10 per listing: no commission on your bookings, no per-user fees, no surprise tiers. Invite your cleaner, your co-host, your property manager: seats are free, you only ever pay per listing.

Keep it simple

If it needs a manual, we built it wrong. Most hosts connect their first channel in one sitting. A couple of steps wait on the platforms themselves, like Booking.com's extranet and Stripe's ID checks, and we say so up front rather than promising a number we don't control.

Built for one property, not two hundred

Host Port started with our own place on a hill. Every feature since has started with a real problem a real host hit, not a roadmap chasing enterprise contracts. If a change only helps someone with a portfolio, it waits.

Honest about the edges

No contracts, no setup fees, cancel from a button rather than a phone call. And where the product has a ceiling, our own pages say so. We'd rather you found the limits written down here than three weeks after you switched.

Who's behind Host Port

G'day, I'm Tristan.

I'm an Airbnb owner. The bubble stay in the story above is mine, live and taking bookings right now.

Host Port isn't a software company that discovered short-term rentals. I'm a host who couldn't find a channel manager made for someone with a couple of listings and a normal budget, so I built one. Every double-booking scare and hotel-priced quote in the story above happened to me first, and my own properties have run on Host Port every day since.

It's also why support works the way it does. When you email, I'm the one who answers, and because I host too, you'll never be explaining a changeover day to someone who has never had one. There's no ticket queue and no script.

I built Host Port for hosts like me: happier outside than at a desk, and firmly of the view that software should mind the calendar so you can get on with your day. The boards aren't a prop.

Fresh boards on pick-up day. Support replies may run a little slower when the surf's good.

My listings, live on Airbnb and managed through Host Port.

Three real stays, taking real bookings today. Every one of them runs on the same Host Port you'd be signing up for, so when I say it works for a small host, I'm betting my own calendar on it.

Sunset over ridgelines behind the bubble dome at Beyond Bubbles, Bucketty.

Romantic Stargazing Dome +Hot Tub 'Beyond Bubbles'Bucketty, NSW

Bubble dome on a timber deck with an outdoor bath overlooking the Megalong Valley.

Romantic Stargazing Dome GetawayMegalong Valley, NSW

Bubble dome at dusk under a vivid orange sunset sky in the Megalong Valley.

Romantic Stargazing Dome RetreatMegalong Valley, NSW

Built different

Small on purpose, and staying that way.

We're bootstrapped. No investors to please means no pressure to chase big hotel contracts, no growth target that turns into a price rise, and nobody upstairs asking why we spent a week on something that only helps hosts with one listing.

What we found when we went looking

Priced for 200-room hotels
A cut of every booking you take
Charged per person on the account
Locked-in annual contracts
Built to answer to investors

Host Port

A flat $10 per listing
0% commission, keep what you earn
Unlimited seats, never per person
Cancel anytime, from a button
Bootstrapped and host-owned

$10

Flat, per listing
0% commission

100%

Bootstrapped
no investors

488+

Booking channels
from one calendar

Australia

Small team,
built here