A website for your guesthouse. Built to book direct.
The booking platforms are very good at filling your rooms. They are also taking somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of every night they fill, and they are not going to stop.
The short version
A guesthouse site has one job: turn the guest the platform introduced you to into one who books direct next time. Every room shown, rates that match, and a reason to skip the middleman.
Most guests find you on a booking platform and then look you up before they commit. That second visit is your one chance: if your own site is worse than the listing they just left, they go back and book there, and a share of that stay goes to somebody else.
Everything below is what we build into a guesthouse site for that reason, and why. None of it means leaving the platforms - it means not paying them for the guests they did not find you.
What a direct booking is actually worth.
Platform commission generally runs between about ten and twenty per cent depending on the platform and the deal. On a room at 95 a night, that is roughly ten to twenty pounds, dollars or euros a night that never reaches you - and it repeats for every night, every guest, every year.
Check your own rate rather than taking that range on trust; it is on your statement. Then multiply it by the nights you sold last year. That figure is the honest argument for having a website at all, and for most guesthouses it is larger than the site costs several times over.
They own the guest’s email address.
You own it, and can write to them next spring.
Commission on every night, forever.
Paid once for the site, then nothing.
Every room, honestly photographed.
Each room you let gets its own photographs, its own description and its rate - including the small one at the back that you are slightly embarrassed about. Somebody travelling alone on a budget is looking for exactly that room, and hiding it does not sell the better ones.
Say what is actually in the room: bed size, whether the bathroom is private or shared, stairs, whether there is a view of anything. The complaints that damage a small guesthouse are almost never about the room - they are about the room not being what somebody expected.
Try this now
Read your own room descriptions as though you had paid for the stay and just walked in. Anything a guest could reasonably feel misled about is a review waiting to be written.
Getting here, and getting in.
Directions from the station, the airport and the main road, with the last hundred yards described in words - a small guesthouse is usually the hardest part of any journey to find. Parking, plainly: where, whether it is yours, whether it is free.
Check-in and check-out times, what happens if a train is late, whether there is somewhere to leave bags, and the house rules that matter: children, dogs, whether breakfast is included and until when. These are the questions that otherwise arrive as emails at eleven at night.
The guest who books direct the second time is the one the first stay earned.
What a guesthouse’s site comes with.
4 to five pages, built for the way your customers actually arrive - written for this trade, not adapted from a template someone else used. The pages we would build are Home, Rooms, Getting here and Your stay.
- Rooms, rates, and what is included
- Book direct, with no commission
- Photos of every room you let
- Check-in times and house rules
- Directions from the station or airport
All of it for $749, paid once. Analytics, Search Console and your Google listing connected, hosting free, and you own the site. There is no monthly fee and nothing here is an upgrade.
What to have ready.
None of this has to be polished. It has to be accurate, because a guesthouse trades on not surprising anybody.
0 of 5 checked
Anything left unticked is a question we would have asked anyway. Sending it up front is what turns a three-week build into a one-week one.
Questions guesthouses and B&Bs ask.
Should I come off the booking platforms?
No. They are very good at finding you guests who have never heard of you, and that is worth paying for. The website is for the second booking, and for the guest who is looking you up before they commit - that is the one you should not be paying commission on.
Can the site take payment or a deposit?
It can take the booking request and send it wherever you want it. Taking card payments is a paid extra with its own costs, so we tell you what it adds before we build. Plenty of small guesthouses take a card number by phone and are fine.
Can I show which rooms are free?
If you use a channel manager or booking system, the site can point at it so availability stays in one place. Without one, a line you update yourself - “three rooms free this weekend” - does most of the same work and costs nothing.
When you pay, why hosting is free, what happens if you want changes later - those are answered on the home page.