Service
Direct booking website design.
The only sales channel where the margin is entirely yours, designed as though that mattered. Full-width photography, a booking journey built for a thumb, and live availability from the system you already run.
Why it matters
The website is the cheapest inventory you own.
Every other channel takes a cut. A UK letting agency typically takes 18–22% including VAT4. Booking.com averages around 15%3. Airbnb's host-only fee runs 14–16%3. Your own site takes nothing beyond payment processing — and hands you the guest data, the relationship and the repeat booking.
Which is why it is strange how little most operators invest in it. Seventy per cent already have a direct booking website; sixty-two per cent of those take under a quarter of their bookings through it, and eighteen per cent take none at all2. The channel is not underperforming because it is a bad channel. It is underperforming because the sites are not built to convert.
Detail
What the work involves.
What you get
Every build covers the same ground, scaled to the size of the portfolio.
- Art direction and a photography brief, or direction of a shoot if you need one
- Property pages designed around what actually sells the property
- Search and filtering for portfolios — sleeps, dogs, hot tub, location, accessibility
- Booking journey prototyped and tested on real phones before it is built
- Live availability and pricing from your channel manager or PMS
- Technical SEO, schema markup, sitemaps and a migration plan built in from day one
- Analytics with step-by-step funnel events so you can see where you lose people
How it is built
Static-first, integrated properly, fast by design.
- Property content rendered statically for speed; availability pulled live so nothing goes stale
- Sub-two-second loads on 4G, measured rather than assumed
- Checkout kept on your own domain wherever the platform's API allows it
- AVIF and WebP imagery with explicit dimensions — no layout shift
- Accessible to WCAG 2.2 AA, because a fifth of your guests need it and Google notices
What it is not
We are quite specific about this.
- Not a template with your photographs dropped into it
- Not a redesign that leaves the booking journey untouched
- Not a project that discovers your platform's limits in week nine
- Not something you will need to rebuild in eighteen months
Questions people actually ask
Straight answers.
How long does a direct booking website take?
Six to ten weeks for a focused build, twelve to twenty for bespoke multi-property work.
Photography and content are what move the date. If you already have strong imagery and property copy, everything gets faster.
Do I need to change my channel manager?
Almost never, and we would usually advise against it. Changing the system that runs your operation mid-rebuild adds risk for no design benefit.
If your platform genuinely limits what the website can do, you will hear that in the audit rather than after you have committed.
What happens to my existing website?
It gets mapped, redirected and retired. Full URL map, one-hop 301s, metadata carried across and daily Search Console monitoring for the first fortnight.
Losing rankings during a rebuild is a choice, not an inevitability.
Get a proposal