How We Discover Properties

CielStay is a discovery platform, not a booking engine. We help travelers find vacation rentals that fit what they're looking for — using AI-powered search that understands style, setting, and atmosphere — and then send them to book through the channel they choose.

Where Our Listings Come From

Every property on CielStay comes from one of two places:

  • The host's own booking website. Many hosts and property managers run public direct-booking websites, often built on property management software such as Guesty, Hospitable, OwnerRez, Streamline, or Track. We find these websites through web search and other publicly available information, and we publish a property only when we can find its page on the host's own booking site.
  • The host. Hosts can add a property to CielStay themselves, or claim an existing listing to manage how it appears.

What We Show

  • Details from the host. The description, photos, amenities, location, and rates published on the host's booking site or provided by the host, with a link to the host's site.
  • Other ways to book. When we can match a property to its listing on platforms such as Airbnb, Vrbo, or Booking.com, we link to it so guests can book where they're most comfortable.
  • AI-generated summaries. Our models write descriptions, tags, and match scores based on the information and photos the host has published. These can contain mistakes. The host's booking site is always the authoritative source for details, rates, availability, and policies.

We also present listings in a structured format that works with AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, so travelers can search CielStay from the tools they already use.

Our Crawler

Our crawler identifies itself as CielStayBot. It reads what your pages show the public, honours robots.txt on the site that publishes the property, fetches at a low rate, and never uses logins, proxies or CAPTCHA solving. If you would rather it didn't visit, one line in your robots.txt stops it. .

What We Don't Do

  • We don't process bookings. Guests complete their booking on the host's site or on the platform they choose, under that site's terms.
  • We don't take a cut of your booking. CielStay never processes guest payments. When a host and guest arrange a stay through CielStay, the guest pays the host directly.
  • We don't charge hosts to be listed. Being discoverable on CielStay is free, and always will be. The optional Pro subscription adds tools for hosts who want them; it never affects where a property ranks.

Your Choices as a Host

  • Claim your listing from its listing page to verify ownership and manage how it appears. Claiming is free, and it's how any guest inquiries already waiting on that property reach you.
  • Remove your listing at any time through our . Once you confirm by email, the listing is hidden from CielStay and won't be re-added from the same source.
  • Report a problem or request a correction by emailing [email protected].

Business Model

Discovery is free, and stays free. Being listed costs nothing, claiming your property costs nothing, and guests never pay us anything. We don't charge for placement or sell ranking.

We earn revenue from CielStay Pro, an optional host subscription at $100/year per property. Pro adds guest messaging, your rental agreement, calendar blocking that syncs to your PMS, monthly and yearly terms, and a monthly report, for hosts who want to arrange stays with guests themselves. It's a flat fee, not a commission — CielStay never processes guest payments and never takes a percentage of a booking. Guests pay hosts directly, on terms the two of them agree. We may also earn referral commissions from some booking platforms; where we do, we say so.

The first 100 hosts to sign up and add or claim a listing get Pro free on every listing they hold, for a year. See for the details.

Questions?

For technical details about how we integrate with AI agents, see our .