Serviced Accommodation
Blue Skies Stays
- WordPress
- Guesty Integration
- Custom Plugin
- Growth Retainer
Blue Skies Stays’ airbnb style booking WordPress website
- WordPress
- Guesty Integration
- Custom Plugin
- Growth Retainer
Xeon Creative designed, built and developed the website for Blue Skies Stays, a North East serviced accommodation provider with 100+ professionally managed homes. The brief was to turn a portfolio of Guesty-managed properties into a fast, searchable booking site that makes it easy for guests, contractors and relocating workers to book direct instead of through Airbnb and Booking.com. It runs on a bespoke Guesty integration, and Xeon now manages the site, designs the print marketing and works with the team on a monthly growth retainer.
What the Blue Skies Stays website includes
The website needed to rival the user experience of Airbnb & Booking.com, so I implemented:
- Search by place, dates and guests, with a live Google map of every home so visitors can browse the North East by area.
- Property pages with full photo galleries, amenities, direct-booking prices and a clear save-up-to-20% message against Airbnb and Booking.com.
- Town and location pages for Middlesbrough, Stockton, Darlington, Hartlepool, Redcar and beyond, written around the people who actually stay.
- Fast property cards: a hover and swipe photo slideshow that helps guests scan homes quickly.
- A mobile-first experience with a persistent search bar, tap-to-call and a sticky ‘Choose dates’ button on every property.
“Tom at Xeon Creative has been an absolute pleasure to work with. We gave him an extremely challenging brief… and he completely smashed it out of the park. He’s incredibly quick, the quality of his work is genuinely unmatched, and I wouldn’t hesitate to work with him again.”
Darriyan Appleton
Head of Growth
A bespoke Guesty integration
Blue Skies Stays runs its homes in Guesty, so I built a bespoke WordPress plugin that connects & syncs all listings into the website. The team works in Guesty, and the website syncs automatically behind it.
- Automatic listings: webhooks and a nightly full sync create and update every property, with photos, amenities and map location.
- Direct booking checkout: guests choose dates, see a live Guesty quote and pay on the site by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay.
- Built-in quality control: only listed, active homes go live, and anything missing photos or details is flagged for review.
- Team alerts: Urgent, Needs you and FYI notifications with self-healing fixes, so the team isn’t chasing errors.
- Booking analytics: server-side GA4 purchase events and a booking ledger, so real bookings can be measured.
Site management & growth retainer
The launch was the start. I look after the website day to day and work with Blue Skies Stays on a monthly growth retainer, so the site keeps getting faster, easier to find and better at turning visitors into direct bookings.
- Site management: WordPress and plugin updates, monitoring, fixes and new releases of the Guesty plugin.
- SEO and content: North East keyword research, rebuilt location hub pages and ‘best places to stay’ guides.
- Analytics and reporting: GA4 tracking and Looker Studio reporting so the team can see what drives bookings.
- Conversion improvements: checkout, search and mobile refinements based on how guests really use the site.
- Design support: posters, promotional graphics and campaign assets that match the website.
Poster & print design
Beyond the website, I design Blue Skies Stays’ print marketing. The posters share the site’s look, with Work Sans type, a navy and sage palette and real property photography, and each carries a QR code straight to blueskiesstays.co.uk.
- ‘Room to live. Not just sleep.’ speaks to guests who want separate living space, their own kitchen and Wi-Fi.
- ‘Here for the project? We’ve got the place.’ is a co-branded design with Middlesbrough Football Club, for contractors and long-stay guests.
Worked with Tom at Xeon Creative across 2 websites and some smaller projects. Very skilled, easy to work with and I couldn’t recommend more highly. Thanks Tom!
Matt Robson
CEO of Blue Skies Group