How a guest books a home
The bar for booking was set by the platforms: pick your dates, see the full price, reserve. So every villa page carries a reserve box that reads the home’s calendar and rates live from Hostaway. It lists the rate per night, cleaning, a card fee and hotel tax, then gives a total and the amount due today for the dates and group the guest entered. It refuses booked nights and stays shorter than the home’s minimum.
Search works the same way across the collection. A guest enters dates on the home page or the villas page, and each home answers with whether it is free and what the stay costs, above a count of how many homes are open for those dates.
Reserve sends the guest on to the checkout at book.spvacationsvi.com with dates, guests and the price breakdown filled in, so nobody searches twice. Payment stays inside Hostaway and no card details are entered on the marketing pages. The box tells the guest what comes next: nothing is charged until they confirm on the booking portal.
One of the homes, The Cerulean, also has a site of its own that we built for its owner, and its guests book through the SP Vacations villa page.
Listings that follow Hostaway
Villa names, descriptions, amenities, bedroom counts and photos on the site all come from Hostaway. When one of them changes in Hostaway, the site follows, with nobody at a computer.
That leaves Sterling Point with one place to edit. Swap a photo in Hostaway and the villa page follows. Change the listing order there and the villas page and the three lead homes on the home page follow. A new listing appears once it has at least 5 photos and a description, and a listing taken off the booking site leaves this one too.
Blog posts are the exception, since they don’t live in Hostaway. The site has its own blog editor for the Sterling Point team, with a sign-in code sent by email in place of a password and a live word count under the post.
Guest reviews from three sources
The reviews page shows 101 selected reviews across 8 of the homes, from Airbnb, Vrbo and guests who booked direct, quoted as written. 78 carry the reviewer’s own photo, and the rest show initials where the source gives no picture. The page says plainly that it is a selection, and each home’s page links to its reviews on Airbnb.
Reviews travel through the same Hostaway connection, so a newly published review reaches the site without anyone copying it over, and one hidden in Hostaway comes off. Each villa page carries its own reviews, and cards from across the collection also appear on the book-direct page and on occasion pages.
The island guide library
The library covers 11 subjects: beaches, the water, land and adventure, history and culture, food and drink, towns, itineraries, each month of the year, trip planning, events and wildlife. We set a target of 4,000 words a guide and let small single-topic pages stop short of it instead of padding them. The hub states its own standard: if a business is named, it was open in August 2026.
A box near the top of each guide and journal post links straight to dates and booking, so someone reading about Cane Bay is one click from the homes. Eight guidebooks stitch the guides into long reads on subjects such as beaches, family trips and first visits.
Island photographs are credited with author and license on the pages where they appear. A credits page lists them next to the original illustrations made for the site, and villa photographs are the homes’ own listing photos.
Pages for people comparing islands
A reader weighing St. Croix against another trip gets 26 comparison pages, among them Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, Aruba and Jamaica, judged on passports, flights, safety advisories, water, cost and crowds. Each of 15 U.S. metros has a page with the route from that city, with nonstops checked in August 2026.
Group trips have their own set: weddings, honeymoons, anniversaries, retirement celebrations, corporate retreats and corporate events, plus pages for family offices and private aviation. The villas sort into collections such as beachfront, private pool, family, couples and large groups. The island map plots the homes beside beaches, restaurants, things to do and landmarks, on satellite imagery hosted by the site itself.
Moving onto a domain already in use
Hostaway’s booking site used to sit on www.spvacationsvi.com, so the launch moved two things at once. The new site took the www address and the booking engine moved to book.spvacationsvi.com, which keeps checkout on the brand’s own domain.
Old links keep working. Old blog addresses forward to the journal, old listing links forward to the same listing on the booking address, and the old all-listings page forwards to the villas page. The 16 posts from the old blog were expanded and carried into the new journal, which has since grown to 17.
