Smoobu website design for hosts who cross borders.

Yes. Smoobu’s booking system can be added to an existing site by link or embedded HTML⁹, so you can keep a website we design and hand over only the transactional steps.

This is the most common Smoobu build we do. You get a site that looks nothing like a template, with live availability and a working booking flow, and no change at all to how you run the properties day to day.

For a host with one or two apartments who wants to be online this week, it is perfectly serviceable. For a collection competing on brand across more than one country, it runs out quickly.

The constraints are the usual ones: template layouts, limited control over property page structure, and nowhere sensible to put the location and guide content that actually earns organic traffic. It is a booking tool with a website attached, not a website with a booking tool in it.

Yes — Smoobu takes no commission on bookings through your own site, only its subscription⁹. Compared with 14–16% to Airbnb or around 15% to Booking.com³, the subscription pays for itself very quickly.

The arithmetic is straightforward on any reasonable occupancy. What is less straightforward is winning the booking in the first place, which is a design, speed and search problem rather than a platform one.

Not through a native Smoobu connection. Smoobu documents a route via HomeToGo¹⁰, and Google’s vacation rental placements generally require a connectivity partner rather than a direct upload.

Your own website competes in ordinary organic results, which is a separate and more durable game. Treat Google Vacation Rentals as another channel with another commission attached, not as a replacement for ranking properly.

Smoobu itself handles multilingual guest communication well, which is why it does so well across the UK, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The multilingual website is a separate build decision, and one worth making properly.

We handle it with real localised pages and hreflang rather than a translation widget. Machine-translated overlays do not rank, and for a German guest booking a Cornish cottage, they do not convince either.

Smoobu publishes a showcase of sites built on its own builder, which is a fair way to see what the template can and cannot do. We do not publish client work yet — when we do, it will come with real numbers attached rather than screenshots.

What to look for when you compare any of them: how fast the property page loads on a phone, how many taps it takes to see a price for your dates, and whether the site has any content on it beyond the properties themselves.