While this is early days, syndication is clearly the most important Jomres functionality to emerge in years.

Jomres has always been about maximizing your control over your business, but we have all had to accept the reality that, in order for a booking business to be viable, we must think beyond our own individual sites, especially as major sites such as Airbnb and Booking.com increase their dominance.

Unfortunately, most of the available paths - such as channel management - are expensive and give away control to corporations who are clearly determined to squeeze site owners for all the money they can get.

As I understand it, the JSN (Jomres Syndication Network) is an optional way for Jomres site owners to publish their properties not only to their own site but, also, to the sites of other Jomres site owners. There is no cost and, if a visitor to that other site decides to book your property, they are brought to your site.

In return, those Jomres site owners can publish their sites to your Jomres site. Their property listings will always appear after your site's own properties. This is a straightforward reciprocal exchange, swapping placements and increasing the exposure of all Jomres properties.

Another very real possibility is that some sites will emerge that list your properties without any requirement for you to list properties from them. For example, a Russian or Chinese designer could create a site in his own language, and containing content to cater to his own countrymen. He could pull in your property listings purely as additional useful content and, again, any of his visitors who want to book would be directed to your site for that.

Another example could be a designer creating a directory site that lists all wheelchair accessible properties, or all properties with their own swimming pool, or pet-friendly properties worldwide. The JSN could allow such a designer to become aware of any properties on your Jomres sites that have the feature in question, and he could then use the API to publish your relevant property listings on his site. For him, it is helpful content for his users. For you, it is free, zero-effort exposure with no reciprocal requirement.

All of this is possible because of the Jomres REST API. Among many other possibilities, the API unleashes the potential for your site to be, essentially, its own channel manager, and that could that many different forms, both technically and financially.

That is why the discussion that Vince is initiating here is so important. This is your opportunity to let him know what directions you would like him to take this in.

For example, at the moment, for simplicity, the JSN is being designed as a purely reciprocal arrangement, but that is not set in stone. You could theoretically have a situation in which individual Jomres owners decide to cooperate on the basis of a set fee in return for referring a booking - that would address the problem that some owners generate more exposure than others. It might also be the case that providing some sort of reward will encourage more designers to create sites that market your properties to different niches that you would never have the time or energy to address yourself.

In our David vs Goliath situation, we independent business owners must be as forward-thinking and innovative as possible if we want to have any counterbalance against the power of the multi-billion dollar corporate giants. The Jomres Syndication Network is just one of the first examples of what Jomres REST API is capable of. Vince has been working hard on ensuring that it the API is as solid a foundation as possible. Now we all need to chime in and help him to build upon it the tools that your business needs to thrive over the next decade.

This is fantastic, what a great feature!!!
For all the little business wanting to grow this is a great opportunity.
And for the techy users, have a look into the API documentation, it is so well done api.jomres.net/?version=latest

Congratulations Jomres for keep evolving!

I thought that I would chip into this discussion. First of all, congratulations to Vince and the team for developing this feature. I think it is long overdue. There are a couple of ways that I think that this will benefit the smaller sites. Firstly, there is the potential for driving traffic from larger websites to smaller sites, which is a good thing. Secondly, if you are building up your portfolio on your website, it certainly does no harm to be able to present an extensive portfolio of properties straight out of the box. Thirdly, (and I hope I am correct in thinking this) it will also pass backlinks among the different Jomres sites. When I look at websites in direct competition to our own (from an SEO perspective), I see a number of sites with a poor menu structure, slow performance, very little rich content, etc; and yet they outperform our own sites (in Alexa ranking, etc). The differentiating factor seems to me to be the number of site backlinks that these poor 'seo' sites have, as well as their use of structured data on their pages and google ad spend. So any advantage we can lever by connecting the Jomres community has to be beneficial.

I think my only concern would be on the geographical content. So for instance, both our sites are focused purely on South France. If we starting showing syndicated content from Bali or Mexico, does that signal some confusion to Google on the local geographic content of the website and, perhaps more importantly, does it confuse the actual customer visiting the site. I have no issues supporting this development as I can only see positives but I wonder if having a localized filter as Vince suggested, could be a way forward. So you can filter properties to appear from a certain region or possibly a certain type of property (boats or vacation rentals or long term rentals, B&Bs, etc - although this would need some global standard property types).

The other thought that came to my mind was that I remember a few years back there was talk of setting up a dedicated Jomres platform, where we could all post our rental properties, tour services, etc. Maybe this is the reverse engineered version of that global platform, but I also think that a platform supported by the Jomres community could be a counter-balance to the big OTAs. Perhaps the running costs could be supported through affiliate advertising and maybe we could benefit from some economies of scale (so could we negotiate a lower commission from the online payment merchants). I would also be strongly in favour of some revenue from the site supporting Vince and Aladar in their ongoing developments of Jomres. But perhaps that is a different discussion.

Anyway, I definitely support this and I hope to see this grow to the benefit of all our sites.

Good day

I wish I had the coding skills of Vince, but I don't, so congratulations. For the smaller sites this function is a must have, but for some sites like ours it will not work, 95% of our clients require to have channel management, so for now I am waiting patiently for the ability to add more channels, I know that Vince has already started with it as he has mentioned in the changelog, Jomres 9.17.1 24/04/2019.

Thank you Vince for all your help, support and coding skills.

Just to let you know Vince, I just checked my Awstats statistics on my siteground account and I have a whole bunch of new backlinks to both my websites from other Jomres sites. It will be interesting to see if this starts to impact the SEO performance of the sites over time. Backlinks is only one of many SEO factors (and the page rank of the linking site has a massive bearing on how much attention Google pays to this as a ranking factor), but it is certainly something to keep an eye on.