CAOBA: 150+ properties, one booking engine, and an API without limits

CAOBA curates independent boutique hotels, villas, and unusual stays, helping distinctive properties grow their direct bookings.

But connecting independent properties to a shared booking platform presents a challenge: how do you create a unified experience without forcing hoteliers to change the systems they already use?

For CAOBA, the answer was the Cloudbeds Open API. With most of its hotel partners already using Cloudbeds, CAOBA saw an opportunity to build its own booking ecosystem directly on top of their existing technology.

“Most of our hoteliers already run Cloudbeds, so being able to plug into each property’s own account without asking them to switch tools was the deciding factor,” explains Antonio Cabrerizo, CEO of CAOBA Hotels.

Through the Cloudbeds Marketplace, hoteliers can authorize the integration themselves, without any technical expertise.

Today, more than 150 properties are connected to CAOBA through Cloudbeds, creating a scalable integration model that doesn’t require custom development for every new property.

Working with Nativo Digital, a development agency based in Mérida, Mexico, CAOBA built its own multilingual, multicurrency booking engine using the Cloudbeds Open API.

The engine retrieves live rates, availability, and room content directly from each property’s Cloudbeds account, then sends completed reservations back into the PMS.

This eliminates the need to manually transfer bookings or maintain separate inventory systems, while giving CAOBA control over its own booking experience.

The next step? Bringing the booking journey fully under the CAOBA website, with integrated search functionality that passes travel dates and guest numbers directly into the engine.

CAOBA controls the guest-facing experience, while Cloudbeds remains the single source of truth for each property.

For CAOBA, the biggest advantage of the Cloudbeds API is its openness. As Antonio puts it, “there’s practically no ceiling. We didn’t have to design around what a partial API would allow.”

With 100% of Cloudbeds’ endpoints available through its open API, CAOBA could build around its own requirements rather than accommodate the limitations of a restricted integration.

Without that access, the team might have needed to redirect guests to third-party booking pages or manually re-enter reservations.

Instead, the entire search, pricing, and booking journey can operate within CAOBA’s own experience, with rates and inventory managed centrally in Cloudbeds.

And because the same integration can be replicated across properties, CAOBA can scale without negotiating separate technical arrangements for each hotel.

More than a custom booking engine, the result is the freedom to build an entire business model around an open platform.

Despite the technical sophistication of its booking engine, CAOBA didn’t need a large internal development team to make it happen.

With a lean development partner, clear API documentation, and responsive support from Cloudbeds’ integrations team, CAOBA brought its booking engine into production.

“With a lean partner we got a production booking engine live without enterprise-level resources.”

For CAOBA, this combination of openness, accessibility, and scalability has been fundamental to its growth. And its advice to other hoteliers is simple:

“Look at the ecosystem as much as the product.”