Direct bookings. Fair fees. Local hosts.

The dominant booking platforms work — for the platforms. For a small lodge owner in Hogsback, they mean handing over a 15-18% cut, fighting opaque suspensions, and never actually owning the guest relationship. We thought there was room for something flatter.

Vilo gives every host a public profile, a direct booking engine, and the boring infrastructure (payments, calendars, invoices, reviews, refunds) that running a hospitality business actually requires. Hosts keep the guest, the margin, and the brand.

• Hosts deserve their margin. A flat subscription, not a per-booking cut, beats the marketplace tax on every level above ~3 bookings a month.
• Local first. ZAR pricing. Paystack, PayPal and manual EFT. SA bank holidays on the calendar.
• Transparency cuts both ways. Guests see the host's actual cancellation policy. Hosts see everything we know about the guest. No mystery margins.
• Boring is good. Invoices, banking, audit logs, GDPR / POPIA tooling, real refund flows — the unsexy stuff a real business needs.

A direct booking platform that does the basics well: a listing editor that lets you describe what you actually have, a calendar that syncs both ways with Airbnb / Booking.com, an inbox that doesn't scatter conversations across email and WhatsApp, and a host page worth sending guests to.

Vilo is in pre-launch — built by a single founder in Cape Town, getting the platform to production-ready before the first beta hosts come on. Follow along on the changelog.

Questions, partnerships, or you want to be one of the first hosts? Mail hello@wieloplatform.com — replies within one working day.