Websites for holiday lets & glamping
Every booking through the platforms costs you 15–20%.
Do the maths on your own numbers: a £700 week at 15% commission is £105 gone — per booking, forever. Twenty direct bookings a year pays for a website several times over. That’s the entire argument, and it’s yours to check.
The problems, as you'd put them
- “The booking sites own my guests — I never even get their email address.”
- “Their commission went up again and what exactly am I getting for it?”
- “Repeat guests still book through the platform because there's nowhere else to book.”
- “My place looks like a listing, not a destination.”
What your site should do about it
A direct booking engine.Live availability, real prices, deposit taken online — so “book direct and save” is a button, not a hope. The platforms stay for discovery; the repeat guests become yours.
A place that looks like the reason people come. Photography-led pages that sell the view, the hot tub, the walk to the pub — the atmosphere a listing template flattens out of existence.
Your guest list, owned.Every direct booking gives you an email address the platform would have kept — which is next year’s occupancy, contacted for free.
For glamping: the site does the explaining a listing can’t — what’s in the pod, what “off-grid” actually means, why it’s worth the drive up the track.
Being found locally
Guests search the place, not you: “cottage near Llansteffan”, “glamping Carmarthenshire”. Pages built around what’s nearby — beaches, castles, the coast path — are what catch them, and they’re content a booking platform will never write about your patch. The free audit shows where you currently stand for those searches.
A January evening, for example
Last summer’s guests decide to come back. They search your cottage’s name, land on your site, check August availability and book with a deposit — at 10pm, from their sofa, commission-free. The platform never knew the booking happened; your calendar and your bank did.
Fair questions
Should I leave the booking platforms entirely?
No — and anyone who tells you to is selling something. The platforms are unbeatable at reaching strangers. The website’s job is converting everyone who already knows you: repeat guests, referrals, people who found you on the platform and went looking for a better price.
Doesn’t double-booking become my problem?
Calendar sync handles it — availability stays consistent between your site and the platforms. How that’s wired depends on which platforms you use; it’s part of the build conversation, honestly scoped.
Is this the same as the £16-a-month site builders?
Different job. Those are brochures; this takes money while you sleep. The working demo arrives with showroom wave two — meanwhile the current demos show the standard of build.
What it costs
Own it outright from £1,995 — for most lets, saved commission pays that back within the first season or two — or fully managed from £299 a month. Run your own numbers against the pricing page; the ROI case here is arithmetic, not faith.