Success story
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Philippe is the co-founder of World Guests Abroad, a multi-brand STR rental company managing curated properties across Europe through 3 brands.
Location: France, Italy, UK
Number of listings: 100+
Using Hostfully since: 2019
Favorite features: Open API access, custom integration & engineering support, multi-brand sync
Hostfully’s open API gave us the freedom to manage multiple brands without duplicating work. Everything runs through one system, even when the guest experience looks completely different.
World Guests Abroad began with a single brand. Paris For Rent was founded in 1998 to manage short-term rentals across Paris, and over time it grew alongside the vacation rental industry. As demand for high-end stays increased, the same founding team launched Paris Luxury Rentals to serve a more premium audience. Later, Haven In was added to support properties outside France, including villas overlooking the Adriatic.
Each brand had its own identity, audience, and direct booking site, but many of the properties overlapped. For example, some listings marketed under Paris For Rent also qualified as luxury rentals and needed to appear on Paris Luxury Rentals. Managing that overlap quickly became a challenge.
“From a branding perspective, it made sense to separate the experiences,” said Philippe Pieri, co-founder of World Guests Abroad. “From a technology perspective, it was a nightmare.”
Most property management systems could only handle a single portfolio per account. Running each brand on a separate system was possible, but it created data silos and made centralized operations nearly impossible. Distribution made things even more complex. Listings needed to appear across multiple brand sites and major OTAs like Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com, all while staying perfectly synchronized.
At the time, closed APIs prevented WGA from accessing and unifying its own data. “We knew we needed one system of record,” Philippe said. “Without an open API, there was no way to manage multiple brands and shared inventory cleanly.”
Hostfully’s open API gave World Guests Abroad the flexibility it needed to unify three brands under one operational dashboard. With Hostfully’s Property Management Software (PMS) as the core system, WGA could manage all properties centrally while listing the same property as a variant across multiple brand sites.
“With open API, everything clicked,” Philippe said. “We could finally treat branding and operations as separate layers.”
Using Hostfully’s API, WGA built its own direct booking widgets for ParisForRent.com and ParisLuxuryRentals.com. Reservations from those sites flow directly into Hostfully and stay synchronized with bookings from Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com. Availability, pricing, and reservations update automatically, regardless of where the booking originates.
As the portfolio expanded, WGA continued to layer custom solutions on top of Hostfully. “Any time we had a new idea, we could either wait for a native feature or build exactly what we needed,” Philippe explained. “That flexibility is rare.”
Custom integrations now power advanced workflows unique to WGA. When a guest inquires about a booked property, the system automatically suggests similar alternatives. Minimum stay rules were replaced with minimum price logic, allowing shorter stays without sacrificing revenue. Paris-specific tax calculations are handled dynamically, and high-resolution images are compressed intelligently to keep direct booking sites fast without compromising OTA requirements.
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By centralizing operations while preserving brand differentiation, World Guests Abroad unlocked a scalable model for growth. New brands, markets, and property variants can be added without rethinking the underlying infrastructure.
“Hostfully lets us experiment without risk,” said Philippe. “We can test new brands, pricing logic, and guest experiences, knowing everything still runs through one reliable system.”
The result is a portfolio that feels curated on the front end and tightly controlled on the back end, all powered by a single API-driven platform.