Add a stay from any booking site, not just the big ones

Every group has one: the friend who doesn't book on the big sites. While the rest of the chat trades links from the usual suspects, they turn up with a farmhouse from a regional agency, a cabin on a site that looks like it was built in 2009, or a campsite with one page and a phone number on it. Until now that find had nowhere to go — it sat in the chat while the shortlist quietly happened somewhere else.

Not any more. VoteStay now takes a link from any booking site, whether we know the site or not, and turns it into a vote card like every other one.

Paste it and see what comes back

When you paste a link from a site VoteStay doesn't recognise, it tries to fetch the stay's name and photo from the page itself. Plenty of small sites publish both, and the card fills itself in. Plenty don't — a lot of local agencies and owner-run sites offer no preview at all — and when that happens VoteStay asks you to type a name instead. Either way the stay joins the vote: the group compares the name, your price note and the link, and votes on it head-to-head like anything else.

That's the honest version, and it's worth saying plainly, because "works with any site" usually turns out to mean "works beautifully with five sites". What's actually true here is narrower and more useful: no stay gets left out of the shortlist for coming from the wrong website. Tracking parameters are stripped, so the same page pasted by two friends stays one card. Links to a raw IP address or a private network address are turned away — that's the whole list of exceptions.

Holiday parks: Landal, Roompot and EuroParcs

For plenty of groups a weekend away means a bungalow on a park, and the only real argument is which park. Landal, Roompot and EuroParcs now each have a page of their own.

Landal and Roompot links roll up to the park. If you copied the link to one specific cottage, VoteStay votes on the park it sits in, so two people who found the same park don't end up with duplicate cards. Roompot cards come in with the park's name and photo. Landal usually passes the park's name along, but not every park page offers a preview image, so some Landal cards go to the vote on name and price note alone — which works perfectly well.

EuroParcs works the other way round: paste the accommodation page rather than the park — the lodge, chalet or villa — and the photo comes in on its own, with the name usually following. When it doesn't, one short line from you ("lakeside lodge for six") finishes the card.

Holiday homes and nature cabins

Belvilla and Novasol both list holiday homes across Europe: the house in the Dordogne, the farmhouse in Tuscany, the place with the sauna somewhere in Denmark. Micazu's houses are let by their owners, so each one arrives with the name its owner gave it, which makes for unusually characterful vote cards. And Natuurhuisje is the one for cabins in the woods, on the water and pleasantly far from anything — its cards show the photo along with the house's number and region, because that is how Natuurhuisje labels its houses.

Paste a property page from any of those four and the name and photo come along for the ride.

Hotels: HRS

City trips need a different kind of shortlist, and a lot of European ones get booked on HRS. Hotel page links from both hrs.com and hrs.de work, the language you copied from is kept, and the hotel's name and photo come in for the card — so the group can vote on hotels the same way it votes on houses.

The point isn't a longer list

It's that the shortlist stops being shaped by which websites happen to paste nicely. The best find in the group shouldn't lose because it lives on a site nobody has heard of, and the group shouldn't quietly narrow itself down to Booking.com and Airbnb just because those links behave. Everyone brings what they found, wherever they found it, and the votes sort it out from there.

If your group is still at the arguing-in-the-chat stage, we wrote a five-step method for choosing where to stay with a group. And when you're ready, start a party, drop the six-character code in the chat, and let everyone paste whatever they've got.