Vacancies displayed on your own website

What is your opinion about getting bookings through your own website rather than through a booking engine? Presumably, you generally prefer that because you pay less commission. You also get the opportunity to present your latest information about special events etc. And if you like a more direct contact with potential guests via telephone or email, then you can invite them to do this.

One way to attract guests to your own website is to display your vacancies there. Many hostels comment on the difficulty of keeping vacancies on booking engines up to date. Since you have to do them manually, your updating may often be delayed, or you may avoid the problem by allocating only some of your beds to that booking engine; in either case, the guest does not see the latest information, and the hostel may appear to be full when there really are beds available. But if you display your vacancies on your own website, you can update it automatically and therefore it can be bang up to date. For example, one hostel in Croatia does this; when I needed to change dates, I didn't have to email the hostel to find out if the change would be possible. Once a guest has identified your hostel, it would be easier for them to find vacancies this way than to work their way through booking engines which are not well set up for this type of search (Choose a country, choose a city, etc).

I am looking into ways of displaying your vacancies on your website, and I would be interested to hear if you already do it, or if you would like to do so but aren't sure how.