A website for your hotel: how to claw back the commission you pay to OTAs

If you run a hotel or a guesthouse, chances are most of your bookings now come through Booking or Expedia. They're useful channels, but for every room you sell there you pay a commission, usually somewhere around 15-20% of the value of the night. A well-built hotel website doesn't replace these platforms, but it opens up a channel where the margin stays entirely with you: the guest finds you, sees the rooms, checks availability and books directly.

We're a web design team from Cluj/Cluj-Napoca, and we build websites for businesses that want to be taken seriously online. For a hotel, that doesn't just mean a pretty page, but a tool that brings in direct bookings and changes the balance of power between you and the OTA platforms.

Why have your own website when Booking already exists

Booking brings you traffic, but it places you on the same page as dozens of competitors, compared almost entirely on price, and it takes a commission on every night. Your own website gives you things a platform never will.

• The full margin on your own channel — a guest who books directly doesn't go through any intermediary, so you don't pay commission on that night.
• Guest data stays with you — having their email and contact details lets you bring them back with a direct offer, something the platform never hands over.
• Control of the story — the atmosphere, the good photos, the tone, all exactly the way you want it, not squeezed into a standard template alongside your competitors.
• A smart rate-parity policy — you keep your price on par with the OTAs, but on your own site you can add a small extra (a transfer, late check-out, a bottle of wine on arrival) that tips the decision toward booking directly, without breaking the platforms' rules.

Realistically, the OTAs will stay part of your life, and that's a good thing for visibility. The idea is to gradually shift part of your bookings onto your own channel, where every night earns you more.

What a hotel website needs in order to produce bookings

A presentation site that looks beautiful but has no features is just an online brochure. For a hotel, the difference is made by the concrete elements that help a guest make up their mind and book without having to call.

• A booking engine with real-time availability and direct confirmation or online payment; ideally synced through a channel manager, so you don't end up with overbookings between your site and Booking.
• Seasonal rates — high season, off-season, weekends, holiday minimums, early booking; with a minimum number of nights where it makes sense.
• A gallery and a page for each room type — single, double, twin, apartment, with square footage, amenities and view, so the guest knows exactly what they're choosing.
• A facilities page — breakfast, parking, spa, pool, pet-friendly policy, check-in/check-out hours, cancellation terms written out clearly.
• An events and conferences section — rooms, capacities by layout type, a request-a-quote form for companies and weddings.
• Location and surroundings — a map, distances to the airport, the train station and the main attractions, plus local recommendations.
• Real reviews — taken from actual guests; we don't invent reviews and we don't recommend fake ones.

The table below shows how these features translate into our packages.

How much a hotel website costs and how long it takes

The cost depends on the complexity of the project. A simple landing page for a small guesthouse starts at 290-490 €. A well-built presentation site, with pages for each room and the facilities, falls in the 490-890 € range. If you want 7+ pages, an events section, seasonal rates and an English version for foreign tourists, you reach 890-1.500 €. The booking engine, with availability and online payment, starts at 690 €, depending on the system and the integrations you choose.

As for timing, a presentation site is ready in 1-2 weeks, provided we receive the room photos and the texts on time. A project with a booking engine takes longer, because it depends on configuring the system and syncing it with the other channels. We explain in detail how the price is put together in our guide on how much a website costs.

After launch, maintenance starts at 29 €/month and covers updates, backups, security and small changes, such as updating the rates before the season. For a hotel, that means peace of mind precisely during the busy periods, when you don't have time to deal with the website.

How the website helps tourists find you

A good-looking website that nobody finds doesn't bring in bookings. That's why we build it with search in mind. We work on local SEO, so the tourist looking for a place to stay in your area finds you, not just the platforms.

• Pages optimized for real searches, like accommodation plus your town, hotel with a pool or a conference room in your area.
• Structured data specific to accommodation, so Google can display the property type, facilities and reviews directly in the results.
• A Google Business profile aligned with the website, so you appear on the map and in the local pack when someone searches nearby.
• Flawless speed and a mobile version, because a good portion of bookings start on a phone, often on the way to the destination.

More and more people ask an AI assistant directly where to stay in a particular city. For its answer to be able to include you, the information about your hotel has to be structured so the AI can understand it easily. We talk about this at length in the article on what AEO/GEO is.

If you run a hotel or a guesthouse and want to see concretely how it could look, we'll prepare a sample website for you free of charge, carrying your property's name, with its rooms and its atmosphere. You see it, you open it on your phone, and only then do you decide whether we go further. Write to us and we'll make your demo.