One villa, three businesses: how La Vita Sukha runs holiday rental, venue hire and coliving in Puglia with Mangobeds

About La Vita Sukha

La Vita Sukha is a villa with a pool in Roseto Valfortore, a mountain village in the Monti Dauni, in rural Puglia, southern Italy. Liz Cirelli, a yoga teacher and permaculture designer, founded it and runs it herself. The house is built around simplicity, respect for nature and a slower pace of life, in a part of Italy most guests have never heard of and remember for years afterwards.

What makes it unusual is that it is not one business, it is three. The villa is a holiday rental for up to 20 guests, a venue for retreats and workshops, and a seasonal coliving with rooms sold one by one. Running all three from one calendar, alone, is exactly the kind of job that normally forces a small operator into either spreadsheets or an enterprise system. Liz does it with Mangobeds, using it as a channel manager for small properties and as the booking engine behind her own website.

One villa, three ways to fill it

Each of the three lines fills the house in a different way, and each one wants something different from the software:

• Holiday rental: the entire villa, booked by families and groups through the big travel platforms.
• Venue hire: retreats, workshops and private gatherings, which start as an enquiry and a conversation, not a click.
• Seasonal coliving and B&B: individual rooms, longer stays, and guests who arrive alone and leave as a group.

The hard part is that all three share the same beds. A retreat in June blocks the rooms that a coliver wanted for the month, and a whole-villa booking on Airbnb has to close the calendar everywhere at once. Get that wrong and you are refunding someone.

A channel manager for small properties, not just big hotels

La Vita Sukha is listed on Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, Agoda and Trip.com, with the villa and the individual rooms sold side by side. Mangobeds keeps availability, rates and bookings in sync across all of them from one screen, so a booking on any channel closes the dates on the rest.

That is normally the part a one-person property gets priced out of. A channel manager for small properties has to do the same work as one for a 200-room hotel, because the double booking costs the same either way. When Liz needed her rate plans to map correctly for a villa that sleeps up to 20, and when she wanted new platforms added to the channel manager, our team enabled them and fixed the mapping rather than telling her the setup was too small to support.

Rates that follow the season, and stays that get cheaper the longer they run

Puglia has a real season, and a coliving has real long stays. Liz sets seasonal rates that kick in on the dates she chooses and long stay discounts that apply from a set number of nights, and Mangobeds does the arithmetic on every search. A guest asking for a month across two seasons sees a correct total instantly, with no manual quote and no back and forth.

Venue hire, which never starts with a booking form

Retreat organisers do not book a venue with a credit card on the first click. They send an enquiry, ask about dates, capacity and the kitchen, and only then commit. Liz handles those as manual bookings and sends a payment link for the deposit, so the money and the calendar still live in the same place as everything else, even though the sale happened over email.

Direct bookings she can actually measure

The coliving booking form lives on the La Vita Sukha website, which means those stays come in without a platform commission. When Liz ran a Meta Ads campaign to fill a coliving month, she needed the ads to know which clicks turned into bookings. Mangobeds now fires a purchase event to your own pixel automatically, with the booking value and currency, so a small marketing budget can be pointed at what actually works.

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“I especially appreciate that the platform can grow alongside a small business, rather than expecting it to be big already.”

Liz Cirelli, Founder of La Vita Sukha

Why Mangobeds fits a small, growing property

La Vita Sukha did not need a hotel PMS, and it could not be served by a simple calendar widget either. It needed professional tools at a price a single villa can carry, and room to grow into the rest of them later.

• One calendar for three business models: whole villa, rooms and retreats share the same availability, so nothing gets sold twice.
• A channel manager for small properties: Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, Agoda and Trip.com kept in sync from one place, with rate plans mapped properly for a villa that sleeps 20.
• Pricing that runs itself: seasonal rates and long stay discounts applied automatically, including stays that cross a season change.
• Room for the bookings that start as a conversation: manual bookings and payment links for venue hire, so retreats live in the same system as everything else.
• Direct bookings that pay for themselves: a booking form on her own site, with conversion tracking for the ads that fill it.
• Support that answers: new channels enabled, mappings fixed and questions answered in hours, not weeks.

In short: one founder, one villa in the Puglian mountains, and three businesses that no longer need three systems.

Want more stories like this one? See how Nine Coliving keeps a small space full in Tenerife, how Lava runs a surf coliving in the Azores, and how ESCAPE runs coliving in two countries. You can also read more about the Mangobeds Channel Manager.

Key Results

• Three business models (holiday rental, venue hire, coliving) running on one calendar
• Five channels kept in sync: Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, Agoda and Trip.com
• Rate plans mapped correctly for a villa that sleeps up to 20 guests
• Seasonal rates and long stay discounts applied automatically, with no manual quotes
• Commission-free direct bookings through a booking form on her own website
• Ad conversions tracked, so a small marketing budget goes where it works

“I run La Vita Sukha, a villa for holiday rental, venue hire and seasonal coliving in rural Puglia. Mangobeds gives me access to tools that can often feel designed and priced for much larger hospitality businesses. The channel manager is particularly valuable, helping me keep availability and bookings organised across different platforms from one place. Although my business is still growing and I’m not yet using every feature to its full potential, Mangobeds has given me a strong professional foundation to build upon. I especially appreciate that the platform can grow alongside a small business, rather than expecting it to be big already. It offers an impressive range of features at an accessible price, and I’m very happy to have found it.”

Liz Cirelli, Founder of La Vita Sukha