How do you build a hotel booking website? Take direct bookings without commission
· Hostopus · 5 min read
Building a hotel booking website is something most boutique hotel and guesthouse owners consider at some point. The reason is commission. According to Booking.com's partner help page, commission is a set percentage of the total booking amount. It covers the room rate plus cleaning, service, cancellation and no-show fees. The exact percentage depends on your country, property type and the accommodation agreement you signed. If you joined a program like Preferred Partner or Visibility Booster, the rate on your reservation statement can be higher than in your contract. A guest who searches for your hotel by name and books on Booking.com still costs you that share.
What does a hotel booking website do for you?
Your own site is where a guest who found you on Google, on Instagram or through a recommendation books directly with you. Booking.com and other platforms keep bringing you guests you could not reach on your own. The site does not replace them. But you pay no commission on guests who come to you by name, and you have the guest's contact details from the start.
This article is for hotels and guesthouses with several rooms. If you are thinking about a site for a holiday home or apartment, see our guide for apartments.
How to build a hotel booking website by hand
- Domain. A short address like yourhotelname.com, also used in your Google business listing.
- Website. With a site builder or a designer: room photos and descriptions, location, check-in and check-out times, and house rules.
- Booking engine. The part where guests pick dates, see available rooms and prices, and complete the booking. Usually a separate service from another company, embedded in the site.
- Calendar sync. If your rooms are also sold on Booking.com, Expedia or Airbnb, a booking from your site has to close that availability there right away. A channel manager does this. Without one you close every booking on each platform by hand. We explain what a channel manager does in this article.
- Payment. A payment provider for card payments, or another route such as bank transfer, a deposit or payment on arrival.
Where a hotel website with booking gets stuck
At most hotels the website, the booking engine and the channel manager come from three different companies. Each has its own panel and prices. Change a room's price on Booking.com and forget the booking engine, and your site shows the old price. If the booking engine is not connected to the channel manager, a room sold on your site stays open on Booking.com. If a second booking lands on the same night, you have to cancel one of them.
The same goes for a guesthouse website. With only a few rooms, tracking by hand looks easy. In high season, with several bookings a day, closing each one in three panels is easy to get wrong. Foreign-language pages, form spam and getting found on Google come on top.
A hotel booking website in Hostopus
In Hostopus your hotel site runs on the same calendar as your hotel's channels. You set it up with a wizard under Website in the menu. Choosing rooms and editing text is awkward on a small screen, so the wizard only opens on a computer. You can view the finished site from your phone. In Hostopus a hotel is currently set up from your room listings on Airbnb: you connect your Airbnb account, pick the rooms that belong to the same property and import them as one hotel.
- The hotel is picked as one card. In the wizard your hotel appears as a single card with its name and room count. Select it and your rooms go onto the site. A room without photos or a price is left out, and the card tells you how many rooms that affects. A site belongs to one hotel, and apartments cannot be added to the same site.
- Guests see available rooms. The home page lists your rooms under Rooms. When a guest picks dates and guests and taps See available rooms, only rooms free on those dates remain, with their prices.
- It stays in step with your calendar. A booking from Booking.com or any other channel closes that room on your site too. A booking from your site is created the same way as a booking you add by hand, and availability is sent to your other channels.
- Request or instant booking. For a hotel you make one choice and all rooms are sold the same way. In request mode the request reaches you as a notification and waits on the Today screen. If you do not reply within 24 hours, it expires. When you approve, live availability in the channel manager is checked as well. Until you approve, those dates stay open on other channels. In instant mode the guest's phone number is required and the booking is created without waiting for you.
- No payment is taken on the site. The guest sees this on screen too. You arrange payment with the guest yourself.
- No automatic email goes to the guest. In request mode, when you approve, a message in the guest's language is prepared for you. You can edit it and send it through your phone's share menu by WhatsApp or email. In instant mode the guest sees the confirmation on screen.
- The permit number lives in one place. You enter your hotel's permit number once. It appears on every room page and at the bottom of the home page as Licence no.. Rooms you add later carry the same number.
- Your own domain, four languages. The site is published only on your own domain. Hostopus shows you the DNS records to add, and once they take effect you get a "Your website is live" notification. You write the text in one language. Turkish, English, German and Azerbaijani versions are prepared automatically. Guests can see prices in EUR, USD, TRY, GBP or AZN.
- It is introduced to Google. When the site goes live, Hostopus adds it to Google Search Console and submits the sitemap. That does not guarantee rankings, but Google can find the site.
Once the site is up, you can also bring your hotel's price into Google's price list. For that, the rooms on your site need to be on instant booking. We cover the steps in showing your hotel's price on Google with your own website.
In short
A hotel booking website needs four pieces: a domain, a website, a booking engine and calendar sync. The real work is keeping those pieces on the same prices and availability every day. In Hostopus your hotel site runs on the same calendar as your channels. You can try Hostopus free for 30 days for your hotel.