Departure point · For independent stays

Travellers now ask AI where to stay.

Stayfarer's job is making sure the answer is your property, and that the booking lands direct with you instead of on an OTA. AI-findability and direct-booking retainers for homestays, guesthouses and independent hotels. Built in Malaysia, working anywhere.

Check your stay. Free, 15 min See the route

Waypoint 01 · The shift

The way guests find you has already changed.

For twenty years the contest was your Google ranking and your OTA position. That contest has moved.

An AI assistant doesn't return a results page with two hundred options. It names a few. Either your stay is in that answer, or the guest never learns you exist. There is no page two to be found on. Malay Mail put the industry's mood plainly on 24 May 2026: "Hotels are scrambling to impress AI."

What a recommendation is worth

84%

say a trusted AI recommendation would make them more likely to book a property. TakeUp, The Rise of AI-Planned Travel in 2026, 14 Jan 2026, from 300 US leisure travellers.

And it already decides bookings

3 in 4

of the travellers who use AI have booked primarily on what it recommended. Same survey.

What we found at home

Exactly 1

Running George Town's discovery queries (Jul 2026), one independent property surfaced via its own site. The rest appeared only inside OTA pages. The full finding.

The same survey found 55% of travellers haven't used an AI tool for trip planning at all. This is early days. Early is also when the work is cheapest: the properties an engine can already verify are the ones it keeps naming later.

Waypoint 02 · The leak

Meanwhile, the commission line keeps growing.

Independent properties take 63.4% of their bookings through OTAs (Cloudbeds, The 2026 State of Independent Hotels, built on 90 million bookings across 180 countries). Here is what those bookings cost.

All-in cost per channel
Booking.com, once visibility programmes are counted	18 to 30%
Expedia	17 to 23%
Airbnb, single host-side fee, cleaning fees included	15.5%
Airbnb has been moving hosts to that single fee since December 2025. The last hosts outside the EU move on 15 September 2026. Current numbers, sources, and the method for working out your own leak: what the OTAs actually take.

↔ Table scrolls sideways on a phone

Illustrative arithmetic, not a survey: 20 rooms × RM 250 × 60% occupancy, 70% of revenue booked through OTAs, blended commission ~20%. Every figure is worked step by step in the table below, so you can substitute your own.

Worked example · 20-room boutique stay
Rooms × average rate × occupancy (20 × RM 250 × 60%)	≈ RM 90,000 / month
Booked through OTAs (70% of revenue)	≈ RM 63,000
Paid out in commission at ~20%	≈ RM 12,600 / month
Shift fifteen points of that share to direct bookings and roughly RM 2,700 a month stays with the property, every month, for as long as the channel holds. That recovered commission is the number Stayfarer prices against.

↔ Table scrolls sideways on a phone

The chart room · Free instruments

Find out where you stand tonight, without talking to us.

Both instruments are genuinely free. No email wall, no "book a call" ambush. If what they show you stings usefully, you know where we are.

Instrument 01 · The Position Check

Eighteen questions. Fifteen minutes. A score, and a fix list in working order.

Four questions. How findable you are. Who takes your bookings. What the machines can read about you. Whether your review engine runs. Each one tells you exactly how to check it. You will learn more from the looking than from the score. Answers never leave your browser; our security policy makes that a technical fact, not a promise.

Run the Position Check

Instrument 02 · Ask the engines

The full protocol for checking what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI say about your property. Twelve queries, our audit's own 0–3 rubric, a printable scoresheet. The method was never the secret; the hours are.

Read the protocol →

Waypoint 03 · The work

Three legs, in order. Each one earns the next.

Leg 01

The AI-Visibility Audit

We ask the questions your guests actually ask. Things like "boutique hotel George Town near the jetty", or "family homestay Penang, 6 pax".

We run them across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI. We record where you appear, where you do not, and who is named instead. Then we put your own booking data against it and price the gap in ringgit.

RM 1,200 at the founding rate, down from RM 3,000. The report is yours whatever you decide next. All rates.

Leg 02

The Findability Fix Sprint

Two to three weeks closing what the audit found. Your site rebuilt to be worth citing, structured data (the machine-readable labels AI engines check) done properly, Google Business Profile and reviews put in order, and a booking path that stops sending your own guests back to the OTAs.

RM 3,600 at the founding rate, down from RM 9,000. Fixed scope, agreed upfront. All rates.

Leg 03

The Findability & Direct-Booking Retainer

The monthly engine, and the reason Stayfarer exists. AI-citation tracking against your market's real queries, a content and review cadence, and a monthly report built on the two numbers an owner actually cares about: where the engines cite you, and what share of your bookings came direct.

From RM 600 a month at the founding rate, priced by property size against the commission you already pay, never against a "marketing budget". All rates and what is included.

Waypoint 04 · The proof

Three AI engines now send one owner’s guests to him instead of Airbnb.

Two apartments at i-City, Shah Alam. We froze six questions and four engines in writing on 17 August, before a page of his site existed, then asked the same six again on 1 September. ChatGPT went 3 to 9, Gemini 5 to 9, Perplexity 1 to 7, and all three now route a traveller to book direct with the owner. Gemini’s own words: “direct bookings skip platform commission fees.”

Read the result, with the queries printed

Here is the reporting that produced it, and that you would get monthly.

A week-zero baseline, screenshotted and dated. What every engine says about stays in your area before we touch anything. Kept, and shown back to you beside every later result.
Citation tracking you don't have to take our word for. The same monitoring tools the large hotel groups subscribe to, read against your market's queries and reported monthly.
OTA-versus-direct share, from your own booking data. The number that is the point of the whole exercise, on one page, every month.
Two things we will not do: promise a specific ranking or citation, or advise you to delist from OTAs. Nobody controls these engines, and anyone promising placement is selling you weather. We reduce dependency on your busiest channel; we don't pick a fight with it.

Waypoint 05 · The stays

Those two apartments are on this page. Go and look at them.

Every property we work for lives here, on this domain, written up by us with the floor plan, the real wifi speed and where the car goes. A traveller books straight with the owner. That is the whole point of the exercise, and it is the thing an engine has to be able to find.

Hyde Tower

i-City, Shah Alam · Selangor

41.6 sqm, sleeps three, 120 Mbps, free reserved bay. The block closest to the covered bridge into the mall.

See the apartment

Liberty Tower

i-City, Shah Alam · Selangor

An oven, a proper dining table and a window over the park. The nicer of the two to sit still in.

See the apartment

Every stay on Stayfarer

Waypoint 06 · 05°25′N 100°20′E · George Town

Run by an operator, not an agency.

For nine years I co-ran Sweet Hut Homestay in Penang. I did the check-ins, answered the 2am messages, and every month I read the OTA statement and watched a cut of my rooms leave with it. Sweet Hut has since closed. What stayed with me is knowing exactly how that statement feels.

Stayfarer is the service I wish someone had sold me in year two. I won't pretend there's a long client list to show you yet. There isn't; you'd be early. What you get in exchange is the version of us with the most to prove.

The first one is live: YourRetreat at i-City, two apartments in Shah Alam, built to be found by an engine and booked without a platform in between. It went up in July. We are measuring what it does before we claim anything about it.

The second went up in August: Pinang Keys, seven apartments across Penang, in Batu Ferringhi, Bayan Lepas and George Town. Same idea at more than triple the size. Before a line of it existed we asked four AI engines thirty-two questions about her apartments and wrote down every answer, so whatever happens next is measured against a photograph of the before.

Koay Shi Chian Founder, Stayfarer

The longer story, and how we work: about Stayfarer. From the studio behind Upcial, in Penang, Malaysia.

Waypoint 07 · Notices

This isn't evergreen urgency. These have dates.

15 Sep 2026

Airbnb's last hosts move to the single fee

One 15.5% host-side fee, cleaning fees included. Most hosts moved across during 2025. 15 September 2026 is the final wave outside the EU. If you are in it, and Airbnb is your main channel, your take-home changes that week. A good moment to know what your direct channel could carry instead. The numbers.
Now → end 2027

Malaysia's biggest tourism push in a decade

The Visit Malaysia campaign was extended through 2027 on 27 April 2026. Its targets stand: 47 million international visitors, and RM 329 billion in tourism receipts. More arrivals is not the same as more bookings for you. A guest who lands in Penang still has to find your property, and still has to choose where to book it. For most independents, right now, that somewhere is an OTA.
Compounding

Engines are citing fewer, more verifiable sources

AI-written listings are flooding travel search, and the engines are responding by trusting less, verifying more. Work that makes your property one of the verifiable few compounds. Done this year, it keeps answering for you next year.

Appendix · Questions owners ask

Asked before, answered straight.

What is AI-findability?

When a traveller asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity where to stay in your area, the engine names a handful of properties it can verify and trust. AI-findability is the work of becoming one of them. The industry calls it GEO, or generative engine optimisation. It takes four things: a technically clean site, structured data engines can read, consistent reviews and listings, and content worth quoting. It sits on top of classic SEO, and Stayfarer does both. The full guide.

Do you replace our OTA listings?

No, and Stayfarer will never advise delisting. OTAs are your busiest channel, and delisting is a fast way to empty rooms. The job is dependency reduction. You grow the share of guests who find you and book you directly, so the commission line shrinks as a share of your revenue.

What does it cost?

The self-check tools and guides are free, with no email wall. Retainers start at RM 600 a month and the audit at RM 1,200, both at the founding rate, 60% below standard, held for as long as you stay. Everything is priced against the commission you already pay the OTAs each month, not against a marketing budget: if Stayfarer can't credibly cost less than the leak it fixes, you'll be told so. The full rate card is public, and founding rates close 31 December 2026.

We're not in Malaysia. Can you work with us?

Yes. The work is research, engineering and content on your digital presence, delivered remotely by design. Malaysia is home and the first market; the method travels.

What would you need from us?

About an hour of your time, your booking mix (what share of bookings comes from which channel), and your listings. For the audit that's genuinely all. Stayfarer does the rest and hands you the report.

Who runs Stayfarer?

Koay Shi Chian, who co-ran Sweet Hut Homestay in Penang for nine years before it closed, and who runs Upcial, a Penang web studio serving Malaysian insurance and financial-services firms. Stayfarer is the same craft, pointed at the industry he came from. More on the about page.

Destination · Your front door

If a traveller asked an AI about your town tonight, would it say your name?

One email finds out. Send your property's name and where it is. We'll reply with what the engines currently say about you, and an honest read on whether a full audit is worth your money. If it isn't, we'll tell you that too.

Email hello@stayfarer.com WhatsApp us

It's the founder who replies, on both. Not ready to talk to anyone? The Position Check asks nothing and tells you plenty.