Case Study for:
The Charlestonian

 The Company

The Charlestonian offers high-end vacation rentals designed for guests seeking a premium Charleston experience. With a strong focus on location, quality, and hospitality, the property attracts travelers looking for alternatives to traditional hotels and short-term rental platforms.

 The Challenge

The core challenge of this project was the Guesty API integration. Guesty utilizes two separate APIs for property data and the booking engine, making full integration complex and highly technical.

The website needed to:

– Display live property information, photos, and availability
– Support on-site bookings with integrated payments
– Minimize ongoing maintenance
– Deliver a clean, intuitive user experience for prospective guests

All of this had to be accomplished while ensuring the utmost reliability and performance. If this site isn’t firing on all cylinders, guests will just book with someone else.

Needless to say, the challenge was impressive, but our team was up for the task

 The Process

The Colophon team worked to integrate both Guesty’s property and booking APIs into a unified system using a plugin. We also built in Guesty Pay as the payment processor so the Charlestonian team’s operations were seamless.

With that structure in place, we built a streamlined booking flow that allows guests to easily find and reserve the right property for their group. All while ensuring the system remains straightforward and simplistic to manage long-term with minimal manual upkeep required. Leveraging our Website Design & Development expertise, we created a solution that balances design, performance, and technical complexity without exposing that complexity to users.

 The Solution

The final result is a gorgeous, high-performing website built specifically to generate direct bookings. Guests can explore the property, view availability, and complete reservations entirely on the Charlestonian website—off platform and on brand.

This project was a tremendous demonstration of how Colophon can solve complex integration challenges while delivering elegant, business-driven digital solutions for hospitality and vacation rental brands that utilize Guesty. Growing a direct booking business is imperative for vacation rental companies, and the best way to do that is creating a fantastic website to enable this experience. The website also creates the perfect opportunity & landing spot for vacation rentals to invest in SEO and Paid Ads that benefits their bottom line by controlling their own traffic and platform while minimizing fees.

The Colophon core value that stuck out on this project is Practical Creativity: Our team loves creating unique systems like this for businesses to solve their problems efficiently and cost-effectively for the long-term.

Explore more Colophon work:
– Catalyst by Beemok
– Charleston Home + Design
– Voyage Auctions
– Portfolio