Setting up your direct booking widget
How to brand, preview, and embed your booking widget so guests can book straight from your own website.
Overview
The direct booking widget is what lets guests search, browse, and book straight from your own website, with zero commission on that booking. It's fully brandable, and every price it shows is calculated server-side, so a guest can never tamper with it.
Setup is a matter of styling it, previewing it, and pasting a snippet into your site. From there, the widget handles the entire guest flow: search, browse, guest details, payment, and confirmation.
Button color
Button label
Live preview
Tesla Model 3
$85/day · Austin, TX
The embeddable booking widget, styled to match your own brand.
How it works
- 1
Customize your branding
Set your button color, button label, background color, font color, and whether to show "Powered by RentHive" branding.
- 2
Preview it live
Check how the widget looks in desktop, tablet, and mobile view before you publish it anywhere.
- 3
Copy the embed snippet
Copy the generated embed code and paste it into your website. It injects a resizing widget wherever you place it.
- 4
Guests book directly
A guest searches by location and dates, browses your fleet, enters their details, pays (by card or pay-on-arrival, depending on your settings), and gets an instant confirmation.
- 5
Manage your public key
Your widget is tied to a unique public API key. Regenerate it from settings if you ever need to revoke access from an old embed.
Best practices
- Match your button color and font color to your existing site branding for a seamless, native feel rather than an obviously bolted-on widget.
- Turn off "Powered by RentHive" branding once you're comfortable with the widget if you want a fully white-labeled booking experience.
- Test the embed on an actual mobile device, not just your desktop browser's responsive mode, before sharing your site link widely.
Things to keep in mind
- Regenerating your public API key immediately invalidates the old embed snippet everywhere it's pasted. You'll need to update every site currently using it.
- If Stripe isn't connected yet, pay-on-arrival is the only available payment option, guests can't pay by card until you connect Stripe.
- Pricing is always calculated server-side using your current rates and tax settings, never trust or hard-code a price into your own site around the widget.
What's automated
- The final price a guest sees (nightly rate × nights, minus any length-of-stay discount, plus your cleaning fee and tax) is calculated automatically at checkout.
- A guest message thread is created automatically the instant a direct booking comes in through the widget.
Common questions
Do I need any code experience to add the widget to my site?
No. The embed snippet is a single copy-paste block designed to work in any standard website builder or HTML page, no custom development required.
Can I run the widget on more than one website?
Yes, the same embed snippet and public key can be pasted onto multiple sites you control, they all point back to the same live fleet and calendar.