Vertical · Hotels, Inns & B&Bs
Keep the room revenue. Stop giving 20% of it to Airbnb.
Every booking through an OTA costs 15–30% of the room rate. Every guest who books directly on your own site costs about 2.9% in card processing fees. The math is clear. The problem is that most independent lodging websites make it easier to book on Airbnb than on them: no real-time availability, no deposit flow, no instant confirmation. So guests book on Airbnb, and you pay commission on a guest who found you directly.
We build inns, B&Bs, and small hotels a fast, custom website with a commission-free direct booking engine built in: real-time availability calendar, named room pages, card deposits, cancellation policy handling, two-way channel sync with Airbnb and Booking.com, and a guest database you own outright. No per-room fee, no per-booking cut, no monthly SaaS subscription that scales up every time you want a feature.
The 3 things people check before deciding where to stay
Here's the decision sequence a prospective guest runs through when choosing between your property and other options in the area. They are not reading your About page. They are not watching a promo video. They're on their phone, running through three specific checks in about two minutes, and the outcome depends almost entirely on how your website handles each one.
Lodging decisions are fundamentally different from restaurant choices or retail purchases. The stakes are higher, the commitment is bigger, and the questions being answered are more personal. A diner choosing a restaurant is picking lunch; a wrong call costs them an hour. A traveler choosing an inn is picking where they sleep for several nights in an unfamiliar place and often anchoring a significant portion of a vacation budget on that choice. Understanding that difference is the starting point for how a lodging website should be structured and what it must be able to do.
First: they check the room photos
For lodging, photos are the entire pitch. A traveler comparing an independent inn against three Airbnb listings at the same price point is making a visual decision before they read a single line of copy. The question they're trying to answer from your photos is not "does this look nice?" It's: "Would I feel comfortable sleeping here for four nights? Does the room look the way the description says it looks? Is the bathroom clean and well-lit? Does this feel like the kind of place I want to come back to after a day out?"
This is a fundamentally different ask than restaurant photography. A great food photo needs to make one dish look appetizing in a single frame. Lodging photography needs to convey an entire experience: the bed and its linens in morning light, the view from the window, the sitting area, the bathroom, the common spaces. Guests are making a trust commitment that lasts days, not an hour, and the photography has to carry the full weight of that commitment.
The most common failure modes on independent lodging sites are not bad copy or unclear pricing. They're photo quality (dark, cluttered room shots taken on a phone from the doorway), photo count (three images of a room that costs $250 a night), and photo loading speed. A professional property photo commonly arrives as a huge file straight from the camera. Load six of those on a page without shrinking them and you have a site that takes eight seconds to finish appearing on a mid-range phone. By second five, the prospective guest has opened Airbnb, where that same property's listing is already trimmed down and loading in under two seconds because Airbnb has invested heavily in making images load fast. They understand how slow pages cost them bookings.
Converting your photos to a modern, far smaller format and sending each device a right-sized version solves the loading problem entirely. Getting good photography in the first place — wide-angle room shots, close-ups of the distinctive details, a full sequence showing bed through bathroom through view — is the one thing no developer can substitute for. It is also the single highest-leverage investment a lodging property can make before any other marketing spend.
Second: they check availability and price for their exact dates
The prospective guest has a specific arrival date and departure date. They want to know two things immediately: is the property available for those dates, and what does it cost? This is the moment where the vast majority of independent lodging websites lose direct bookings to the OTAs, and it's entirely preventable.
If your website answers this question with a contact form, email address, a "call us to check availability" instruction, or a static "rates starting at" statement with no actual calendar, many of those guests will simply go to Booking.com or Airbnb where the answer is instant. You'll receive that booking and pay 20% of it to the platform for answering a question your own website should have answered in three seconds. This is how OTAs extract commission revenue from independent properties with an online presence but no functioning direct booking channel.
A real-time availability calendar with live pricing for each room type eliminates this. The guest enters their check-in and check-out dates, sees immediately which rooms are open and what they cost, and proceeds directly into the deposit and confirmation flow without leaving your site, making a phone call, or waiting for an email response. The availability widget needs to be in the hero section, visible without scrolling on a phone screen, not buried below a gallery section, testimonials block, and copy about your history.
Every failed direct-booking attempt trains guests to use OTAs for future stays at your property.
Third: they check what's around the property
Lodging is destination-driven in a way that almost no other hospitality category is. Someone choosing a restaurant is choosing a meal; the neighborhood is secondary. Someone choosing an inn or B&B is usually choosing a destination, an experience, or a reason to travel first. The property is how they access it: the wine region, the national park, the coastal town, the ski mountain. Property search and activity planning happen simultaneously, and often the destination is locked before the property search begins.
This creates a powerful SEO opportunity that most independent lodging operators leave untapped. A traveler researching a weekend trip to the Blue Ridge is actively searching for "hiking trails near Blowing Rock," "best restaurants in Boone NC," "fall leaf peak timing Appalachian," and "things to do in Watauga County" before comparing any property. An inn with a well-built area guide captures that upstream search traffic at the destination research stage. The guide includes local trails with trailhead directions, seasonal events calendar, restaurant recommendations, winery map, and driving times to area attractions, all before the traveler starts comparing properties or prices.
These area guide pages compound over time in a way that paid advertising doesn't. A guide to fall foliage hikes near your property, published in September and properly indexed by Google, continues ranking and driving traffic every subsequent fall season without additional spend. It gives a potential guest a concrete reason to choose your specific property over a competitor with identical room counts and similar pricing. You become the inn that knows the area, helps guests plan their trip, and makes the experience better before they arrive. That positioning is differentiating in a way that room photos and amenity lists cannot match.
What a lodging website needs to do
A well-built inn or B&B website has a tighter job description than most business sites. It needs to win the trust of a stranger who is about to hand you money to sleep in your property, answer every logistical question they have before they need to ask it, compete against OTA listings that are optimized by engineering teams with nine-figure budgets, and make booking as frictionless as Airbnb. Here is the full scope of what it requires.
Commission-free direct booking
Guests check dates, see real-time availability, pick a room, and pay a deposit directly on your site. No OTA taking 15–30% of the room rate. No "contact us to check availability" form sending them to Booking.com instead. The booking flow lives entirely on your own domain: date selection, room choice, deposit payment, instant confirmation. A direct booking costs about 2.9% in card processing. The gap between 2.9% and 20% is the entire financial case for owning your booking engine.
Individual room pages that sell rooms
Each room gets its own dedicated page with a proper photo gallery, full room details (bed configuration, square footage, view, specific amenities, what makes it different from other rooms), rate information, and a direct booking entry point. Not a single scrolling list of all rooms crammed onto one page. Individual room pages are independently indexable by Google. Someone can land directly on the Birch Room page from a search result, and guests get a specific, shareable URL to send when recommending your property. "Book the Garden Suite" is a much more useful link than "check our website."
Channel sync, actively monitored
Two-way iCal sync with Airbnb, Booking.com, and VRBO means a booking on any platform immediately blocks those dates everywhere else. The system includes a feed-health monitor that alerts you when a feed breaks, rather than letting calendars drift silently until a guest calls to report a conflict. Properties needing real-time rate-and-availability API sync get the full channel manager add-on. At peak season, the iCal refresh delay creates double-booking risk, which the channel manager eliminates with true bidirectional OTA connections instead of calendar polling.
Deposits, policies, and guest records
Each rate plan carries its own cancellation terms, snapshotted to the reservation at booking time so later policy changes never affect an existing guest's agreement. Breakfast covers log automatically for each morning of every stay. No manual count the night before. Dietary flags and preferences stored on guest records that persist across repeat visits. These operational details make a B&B feel attentive rather than going through the motions. Large PMS platforms treat breakfast tracking as an afterthought; here it's a first-class field.
You own the data. No SaaS tax.
The booking engine, guest database, full reservation history, rate configurations, channel mappings: all yours, self-hosted on your own server. No per-room pricing penalizing you for adding capacity. No monthly subscription doubling when you need a feature tier upgrade. No vendor holding your guest list hostage when you leave. The recurring costs are hosting (low) and card processing (standard rate, paid to your processor). Everything else is a one-time build cost returning value indefinitely.
Area guide pages that build organic traffic
Travelers search for the destination before they search for a place to stay. Area guide pages — local hiking trails, restaurant picks, wineries, seasonal events, nearby attractions with driving times — capture that upstream destination-research traffic and position your property as the expert in your area. These pages live on your domain, rank independently in Google, and compound over time. A well-built fall foliage guide published once continues driving qualified bookings every October season.
Booking engines and channel managers: what to use and when
Independent lodging operators navigate a crowded field of booking platforms, channel managers, PMS tools, OTA integrations, and widget embeds. The choices you make about which systems to run and how they connect to your website determine both what you pay per booking and how much control you retain over the guest relationship. Here is how to think through it clearly.
Custom direct booking engine vs. embedded third-party widget
The first question is whether to build a direct booking engine into your site or embed a widget from an existing PMS or channel manager. Both are valid depending on where your property stands financially and operationally.
- Custom direct booking engine (built by ArdinGate) — the booking engine lives on your own server, on your own domain. No per-room fees, no per-booking commission to a software vendor, no third-party platform branding appearing mid-checkout. Guests never leave your site during the entire reservation flow, from date selection through deposit payment through confirmation email. Full ownership of the guest database, all reservation history, and all rate configurations. This is the long-term play for any property doing enough direct booking volume to justify the one-time build cost. Most properties reach breakeven against a PMS subscription within 12–18 months.
- Embedded third-party widget — if you are running Cloudbeds, Little Hotelier, Lodgify, Guesty, Hostaway, SiteMinder, or a similar PMS, the widget can be embedded cleanly inside your site's design. Guests experience your branding until the checkout step, which typically shows the PMS provider's own screens. The right call when you are mid-contract, recently launched on a PMS, or not yet at the direct booking volume where owning the engine makes financial sense. ArdinGate can position and style your existing widget so it converts, rather than buried further down the page where guests miss it.
OTA integration: iCal sync vs. real-time channel manager
If your property is active on Airbnb, Booking.com, VRBO, or Expedia, something has to keep your calendars in sync across all of them plus your own site. The two integration tiers differ meaningfully in speed, scope, and cost.
- iCal sync — every major OTA exports a calendar feed and accepts one in return. Two-way iCal sync means a booking anywhere blocks the dates on all connected calendars within the feed's refresh interval, generally 15–30 minutes depending on the platform. It syncs availability only, not rates. For most small inns and B&Bs running a moderate number of channels with moderate booking volume, iCal sync is the correct solution: reliable, low-cost, and sufficient. The baseline build includes iCal sync with Airbnb, Booking.com, and VRBO, plus the feed-health monitor that alerts you if any feed stops updating.
- Real-time channel manager (API-level sync) — rather than polling calendar feeds, an API-level channel manager pushes availability and rate updates to the OTAs the moment something changes in your system. Blocking a date is instant; rate changes propagate in seconds. This matters at properties moving significant volume across multiple OTAs during peak season, where a 20-minute window between an Airbnb booking and a calendar update on your own site creates double-booking risk. The channel manager add-on is at the top of the custom-build price range. For properties running a third-party PMS, SiteMinder and Cloudbeds' own channel manager are the two most widely deployed options at small hotel scale. Both can be embedded widget-style while you evaluate moving to a fully owned system.
When to embed vs. when to link
When using a third-party tool rather than a custom booking engine, the integration question is whether to embed the widget inline or use a prominent button that opens the booking page in a new tab.
Embedding keeps the guest inside your site's visual environment through the reservation flow. No jarring redirect, no uncertainty about whether they're still on your site, no browser navigation away from your domain mid-booking. For properties with a booking widget rendering cleanly on mobile, loading in under two seconds, and resizing correctly at phone screen widths, embedding delivers a better guest experience than a redirect. Most major PMS providers offer an embed snippet that works adequately. Usually the issue is placement, not the widget itself.
A prominent button — "Check Availability" or "Book Direct" in the hero section and the navigation — works better when the widget is slow to load, holds up the rest of your page from appearing, or doesn't resize gracefully at small screen widths. Guests ready to book will follow a clear, well-placed button. They don't need the booking form embedded on every page. They need to find it instantly from any page, on any device, without scrolling past a gallery section and copy.
The mistake to avoid is treating booking entry as secondary content. Properties burying their availability widget or booking link to prioritize the story and photography are making the same error as a retailer hiding the Add to Cart button. The guest decision has three stages: photos first, availability second, booking third. Your layout needs to support all three in that sequence. Don't make the guest hunt for the third one after deciding.
A property paying $300/month on a PMS subscription spends $3,600 a year on software it will never own. Over three years: $10,800 in subscription fees, no asset at the end, guest data stored on someone else's servers, and a cancellation process requiring negotiation with a vendor's retention team to get your own booking history. The custom booking engine is a one-time build cost running on your server with no monthly fee, no per-room charge, and no commission on any booking, for as long as you want to run it. For most small properties, ownership becomes cheaper than subscription between twelve and eighteen months. After that, every direct booking through your own site is more profitable than it was on day one of the subscription.
Making a property-photo-heavy site load fast on mobile
Lodging websites are image-heavy by necessity. Travelers need to see the rooms, the common areas, the views, the property in its setting. A lodging site without strong, abundant photography doesn't convert. No copy is clever enough to substitute for guests visually confirming that the room looks the way they hope. But unoptimized property photos are the most common technical reason a lodging website loads slowly enough to hand the booking to an OTA. OTAs have invested significantly in image optimization because it directly affects their revenue. Here's the specific approach that keeps a photo-heavy site fast.
Every photo is shrunk to a modern, far smaller format
Professional property photography arrives as enormous files straight from the camera: the right thing for print or any future use needing maximum quality, and exactly the wrong thing to send as-is to a phone. A well-lit wide-angle room photo from a professional photographer commonly runs 4–8MB. A phone camera room shot is 3–5MB. Load six of those on a property page and you're sending 20–40MB of image data before the page shows anything a guest can tap or scroll. On a mid-range phone on a cell connection, that's a seven to ten second wait. The guest has opened Airbnb before second five.
We convert every photo to a modern image format that's far smaller without looking any worse. It consistently produces files 30–50% smaller than the original at the same visual quality, with settings that let us fine-tune the tradeoff between size and sharpness. Every major browser has supported this format for years. Converting your room and property photos this way brings a 30MB gallery down to 12–15MB — the difference between a page that appears in three seconds on a phone and one that takes eight. The conversion happens once when we build the site, with the original kept as a backup for any rare older browser. No ongoing processing, no extra load on your server, no plugins to keep updated.
The practical impact for lodging sites is especially significant because the photos are large (room shots need wide angles and good light to show the space accurately) and numerous. A B&B with eight rooms might want a gallery of 6–10 photos per room, plus common area photos, exterior and grounds shots, and seasonal photography. This smaller format is the foundation that lets you carry all those images without wrecking how fast the page loads.
Each device gets a right-sized image, so phones download less
A full-width hero photo of your property on a large desktop monitor needs to be wide enough to fill that whole screen. On a small phone screen, that same image only displays a fraction as wide. There's no reason for the phone to download a giant desktop-sized image to show it small — that's many times more picture data than the screen can actually use, all wasted on download time the guest sits through.
We solve this by preparing several sizes of each image. When we build the site, every photo is exported at a range of widths, from small phone size up to large desktop size. Each visitor's browser then picks the right one for their screen before the download even starts. A phone on a cell connection grabs the small version. A high-resolution laptop grabs the large one. Neither downloads more than it needs to show the photo sharply.
For a lodging site with individual room photo galleries (8 photos per room, 10 rooms, plus exterior and common areas), the total reduction in page weight on phones from this approach is dramatic. Every gallery image loading at phone size instead of full desktop size is roughly one-fifth the download. Multiplied across a full property gallery, right-sizing images is often the single largest speed gain on photo-heavy lodging builds.
Photos load as visitors scroll, so the page never feels slow
A guest landing on your homepage sees the hero room photo and maybe one or two images within the first screen. They don't see the gallery section with twelve more room photos until they scroll down. There's no reason to download those twelve photos while the guest is still reading the headline at the top.
So we set the gallery photos to load only as visitors scroll toward them, instead of all at once when the page first opens. Each image is fetched right before the guest reaches it, not up front. For a lodging site where most of the property photography lives in gallery sections further down the page, this cuts the weight of the initial load by 60–70%. The page only pulls in images the guest is actually looking at.
The one exception is the main hero photo, which should never wait. It's the first big thing a guest sees on any lodging page, so it needs to be fully loaded before anything else. Making the hero wait would wreck the first impression of a property site. The hero gets the opposite treatment: it loads right away, and it's told to start loading first, before everything else on the page.
Your main photo loads almost instantly
One of the things Google measures is how fast your main photo or headline actually shows up on screen. For a lodging website, that's almost always the hero room or property photo. It's one of Google's page-speed health checks: a fast result is a positive signal for your search ranking, a slow one counts against you. But it's also just a direct measure of the guest's experience. If the hero photo takes three seconds to appear, visitors assume the page is broken or slow and leave before it finishes loading.
We tell the browser to start fetching your hero image first, before anything else on the page, the instant a visitor arrives, so the first thing they see appears almost immediately instead of slowly fading in. For a typical lodging hero image, this shaves 0.5–1.5 seconds off how fast that main photo shows up on a phone, which is often the margin between passing Google's speed check and failing it. On these pages the hero photo is picked at random on each visit, so the site is built to flag the exact photo that's about to appear, ensuring the right one gets the head start every time.
Together, shrinking the photos, right-sizing them per device, loading the gallery as visitors scroll, and giving the hero a head start consistently keep a lodging site passing Google's page-speed and stability health checks on both phones and desktops. That matters for showing up in local search results, where most lodging bookings begin. It also matters because fast pages turn more visitors into bookings than slow ones. Travelers planning a trip and comparing properties won't wait for a slow site when the Airbnb listing for the same property loads in a second and a half.
Pricing
A marketing site for a small lodging property (rooms pages, photo gallery, area guide, contact) runs $2,800–$5,000. The self-hosted direct booking engine and property-management system starts at $4,500 and runs $4,500–$12,000 depending on scope.
The base booking engine covers B&B mode: named rooms with individual pages and photo galleries, a real-time availability calendar with per-room and per-rate pricing, card deposit and full-prepayment handling through your own card processor, cancellation policy terms snapshotted per reservation, a guest records database with dietary flags and preferences that persist across stays, breakfast cover tracking, and two-way iCal sync with Airbnb, Booking.com, and VRBO including the feed-health monitor. The top of the range adds a full real-time channel manager with API-level OTA sync, hotel-mode room-type inventory with count-based availability, seasonal and derived rate plans, multi-jurisdiction tax handling, the nightly audit with occupancy, ADR, and RevPAR reporting, group blocks, split folios per stay, and housekeeping status tracking. You own all of it outright — no per-room fees, no per-booking commissions to a software vendor, no monthly subscription.
Prefer to keep your current PMS? Embedding your existing booking widget from Cloudbeds, Little Hotelier, Lodgify, Guesty, Hostaway, or another platform starts at $300. The widget is positioned and styled so it's visible in the hero section without scrolling, not buried further down the page where guests miss it.
Optional managed support from $75/month covers channel-mapping upkeep as the OTAs update their feed specifications, software and security updates, and priority response when a booking-flow issue arises. It's a fraction of what a standard PMS subscription costs, with the benefit of whoever built your specific system handling the maintenance.
Common questions
A marketing site for a small lodging property (rooms pages, gallery, area guide, contact) runs $2,800–$5,000. The self-hosted direct booking engine and property-management system starts at $4,500 and runs $4,500–$12,000 depending on scope. The base covers B&B mode: named rooms, real-time availability calendar, card deposits and cancellation policy handling snapshotted per reservation, a guest records database with dietary flags and preferences, breakfast cover tracking, and two-way iCal sync with Airbnb, Booking.com, and VRBO including a feed-health monitor that alerts you if a feed breaks. The top of the range adds a full real-time channel manager, hotel-mode room-type inventory with count-based availability, seasonal and derived rate plans, multi-jurisdiction tax handling, the nightly audit with occupancy/ADR/RevPAR reporting, group blocks, split folios, and housekeeping status tracking. You own all of it outright with no per-room fee, no per-booking commission, no monthly subscription. Optional managed support from $75/month covers channel-mapping upkeep, software updates, and priority response when a booking issue comes up. See the full pricing breakdown →
Those are capable products, and the right answer for some properties in some situations. The problem is the long-term economics. A small inn on Cloudbeds, Little Hotelier, RoomRaccoon, or Guesty commonly pays $200–$500 per month once the channel manager, booking engine, and payment markup are stacked together — that's $2,400–$6,000 per year, every year, on software you'll never own. Add per-room pricing penalizing you for adding rooms or capacity, an onboarding fee up front, and on some plans a percentage cut of every booking the platform processes. A custom build reverses that model: the booking engine lives on your own server, your guest data is yours, and the only recurring costs are standard card processing fees around 2.9% plus hosting. For most properties the one-time build cost pays for itself against a subscription within one to two years, after which every direct booking through your own site is simply more profitable than it would have been under the subscription.
Yes. The baseline build includes two-way iCal sync with Airbnb, Booking.com, and VRBO so a booking on any platform immediately blocks those dates on all connected calendars. Because iCal feeds can break without any visible notification — the OTA simply stops sending updates and your calendars quietly diverge — the system includes a feed-health monitor that alerts you the moment a feed stops refreshing, rather than waiting for a guest to report a double-booking conflict. The iCal refresh interval is typically 15–30 minutes depending on the OTA, which works for most small properties at moderate volume. Properties needing instant propagation during high-demand periods — where a 20-minute window creates meaningful double-booking risk — get the full real-time channel manager add-on at the top of the price range. That's a true bidirectional API connection to the OTAs, not a calendar poll, and it syncs both availability and rates in seconds.
Guests pay a deposit or full prepayment at booking through your own card processor. You're not routing payments through a third-party platform taking a cut or holding funds. Each rate plan carries its own cancellation policy: a free-cancel deadline with a hard cutoff time, a specific penalty amount (first night, 50%, full stay), or a fully non-refundable structure. Those policy terms are snapshotted onto the reservation record at the moment of booking, so any later policy change never retroactively affects an existing guest's agreement. What they booked is what holds. Breakfast covers log automatically for each morning of every stay, giving your kitchen an accurate count without manually reviewing reservations each evening. Dietary flags and meal preferences live on the guest profile and persist across all repeat visits. That returning guest's gluten intolerance or dairy allergy is already on file, so no need to ask again. These operational details create repeat-guest loyalty at independent properties. The large PMS platforms treat breakfast and dietary tracking as secondary features; here they're first-class data fields.
Yes. It's one system with two distinct operating modes, configured at setup based on how your property operates. B&B mode treats each room as a named, unique unit (the Birch Room, the Garden Suite, the Loft Apartment) that guests browse and select directly during the booking flow. Guests book a specific room, not a room type, which is exactly how independent inns and B&Bs sell. Hotel mode treats inventory as room types with a count (twelve Standard Kings, four Deluxe Doubles, two Suites) sold against total availability per type, with the specific room assigned at check-in rather than at booking, the way chain hotels and boutique hotels with multiple identical rooms operate. Hotel mode adds housekeeping status tracking per room, group reservation blocks, split folios for extended stays, and a full real-time channel manager. The same underlying booking engine runs a three-room inn and a thirty-room boutique hotel. It's not a B&B-only tool you'll outgrow. The mode is a configuration choice, and hotel-mode features can be added at any point.
The marketing site (rooms, gallery, area guide, contact) generally delivers in 2–4 weeks. The booking engine and PMS timeline depends on scope: a B&B-mode direct booking build is a few weeks once content is ready; a hotel-mode build with a full channel manager and API-level OTA connections runs longer, with timing largely driven by OTA onboarding and rate configuration on the platform side. The biggest variable is almost never the development itself. It's content readiness on your end. Specifically: room descriptions and professional photography for each unit, your rate structure and any seasonal pricing logic, tax rates per jurisdiction if your property spans county or state lines, and getting your card processor account configured and your OTA listings connected and verified. When those assets are organized and delivered at kickoff, the timeline comes in at the short end of the range. Projects starting without complete photography or unclear rate structures take longer. Every project begins with a free scope call to nail down exactly what's needed before any timeline is committed.
Four techniques bring a photo-heavy lodging site to passing Google's page-speed health checks on phones. First, every property and room photo is converted to a modern format that's far smaller without looking worse, cutting file sizes 30–50% — a professional room shot arriving at 8MB drops to 3–4MB. Second, each device is sent a right-sized image based on its screen, so a phone on a cell connection downloads a small file, not a giant desktop-sized one. Third, gallery photos further down the page load only as the guest scrolls toward them, cutting the weight of the initial load by 60–70% on photo-heavy layouts. Fourth, the hero room photo is told to start loading first, before everything else, so it appears within about a second on a typical phone connection: the hero is usually the biggest thing on a lodging page, and how fast it shows up is both a search ranking signal and the difference between a guest who stays and one who opens Airbnb instead.
Yes. If you prefer to keep your current PMS or channel manager — Cloudbeds, Little Hotelier, Lodgify, Guesty, Hostaway, SiteMinder, or anything else — the site can embed your existing booking widget or link cleanly to your hosted booking page. The embed option keeps guests inside your site's visual environment through the reservation flow, which tends to improve conversion when the widget loads quickly and resizes correctly at phone screen widths. When a widget is slow, holds up the rest of the page from appearing, or doesn't handle mobile layouts well, a well-placed "Check Availability" button in the hero section and navigation is the cleaner option: guests ready to book will follow a clear, visible button. Either way, the design ensures the booking entry point is visible without scrolling on a phone. The most common mistake on lodging sites using third-party widgets is burying the booking entry point further down the page, where guests who decided to book give up and go to Booking.com instead. Embedding or linking to an existing widget starts at $300 depending on the platform and the level of styling the widget allows.
Lodging is one of the highest-intent local search verticals: someone searching "inn near Asheville" or "B&B in the Hudson Valley" is actively planning a trip, has a destination in mind, and is ready to book. Missing the map results or the top of the search page on those searches is a direct revenue loss. Every build includes behind-the-scenes labels that tell Google exactly what your business is — your property address, phone number, check-in and check-out hours, room count, amenities, and location; a review of your Google Business Profile to catch common mismatches (address formatting, category selection, check-in hours) that quietly keep you out of the local map results; a check that your name, address, and phone appear identically on every page and everywhere else online, since inconsistencies hurt your local ranking; and we tell Google about every page on your site at launch and ask it to index them. Area guide pages are one of the highest-performing organic strategies for independent lodging properties because travelers search for the destination before searching for a property. A guide to fall foliage timing, regional hiking trails, local wineries, or nearby driving distances published as a real page on your own domain captures that upstream destination-research traffic and positions your property as the local expert, building up in search ranking over multiple seasons without additional spend.
Also building for: restaurants & food service · online stores · all small businesses
Stop splitting your room revenue with an OTA.
Tell me how many rooms you have, which platforms you're on, and what you're currently paying to run them. I'll send back a scope and a quote for a direct booking engine you own outright — no per-room fees, no per-booking commission, no monthly subscription.
Get a quote