Ask a hotel owner in the Carpathians where their guests come from. Booking.com. And the commission is 15-18% of each booking. That means for a room costing 2,000 hryvnia per night, the owner pays Booking 300-360 hryvnia. Every day. For each room. Multiply that by the summer season, and you get the amount that could be used to build two websites from scratch.
Paradox: most hotels have a website. But either it dates back to 2015, doesn’t offer online booking, or takes so long to load that guests have time to book on Booking.com while they wait. The website seems to exist, but there are zero direct bookings from it. It’s nothing more than a pretty postcard.
At Estetic Web Design, we have created websites for hotels and resorts, and we know how to turn this postcard into a sales channel. Among the clients who ordered website development in Kyiv were hoteliers, and each time the project began with the same questions. Let’s talk about them.
Reservations: without them, the website is just a photo album
Let’s call a spade a spade. If a hotel website doesn’t have a calendar showing actual room availability and a payment button, it’s not a hotel website. It’s a photo album with a contact number. People look at the photos, think “cool,” and go to Booking to make a reservation because it’s clear and familiar.
What a normal booking module should do: show available rooms for the selected dates (no “call back for confirmation”), automatically calculate the cost taking into account seasonal prices and special offers, accept payment or prepayment by card, send confirmation by email and Viber. The guest selected the dates, saw the price, paid, and received an email. Three minutes instead of fifteen minutes on the phone.
Technically, these are either ready-made engines such as Cloudbeds, Beds24, TL Booking Engine, or a custom solution for your CMS. Ready-made engines are quicker to implement and can synchronize with Booking and Airbnb via a channel manager. Custom engines are more flexible, but take longer to implement. Installing modules and options allows you to connect both options. And most importantly, synchronization between channels. If a guest books on Booking, the room is instantly closed on the website. Double booking is a scandal, a one-star review, and a stain on your reputation.
Photos: here, you either sell or lose
A hotel is a product that cannot be touched before purchase. It is chosen with the eyes. Photos taken on a phone in yellow light, with an unmade bed and crooked curtains, lose out to the neighboring hotel, where a photographer was called in once. One day of shooting, and the photos work for years.
Minimum requirements: a separate gallery for each room category (rather than a collection of 60 photos mixing standard and deluxe rooms), photos of common areas—restaurant, pool, grounds, parking lot. A video tour or 360° panorama is no longer a luxury, but an expectation of the modern guest. And each image is optimized for the web: high quality, but without a ten-second download time.
The gallery’s well-thought-out design features a lightbox with navigation, photo captions (room type, size, view from the window), and a “Book this room” button right below the gallery. I look at it and book it right away. No wandering around the site looking for the coveted button.
Where you are and what’s around you: the map decides
People don’t book walls — they book a place. By the sea? Near the ski lift? In the city center? The map on the website should show not only your location, but also the surrounding area: the beach 200 meters away, nearby restaurants, ATMs, bus stops, and attractions.
For recreation centers with large territories, an internal map is also needed: where each building, swimming pool, restaurant, barbecue area, and playground is located. A map with markings can be made in a day and is very helpful for guests to get their bearings before they arrive.
And don’t forget the “How to get there” page. Don’t just say “we are located in a picturesque corner of the Carpathians” (which doesn’t mean anything to anyone), but give specific details: “take the E471 highway, turn after the WOG gas station towards Yaremche, then follow the signs for 3 km.” GPS coordinates for the navigator, train and bus numbers, distance from the nearest airport. Details that save guests’ nerves — and you phone calls asking “how do I get there?”
Reviews: your weapon against Booking
“Why have reviews on your website if they’re already on Booking?” — I hear this all the time. The answer: because you want guests to book with YOU. And they book where they feel confident. Reviews on your website — with real names, dates, photos, and responses from management — are what build trust. Booking.com is far away. But your website is right here, alive and well.
You can pull reviews from Google Reviews via API—they will be updated automatically. Or create your own system with moderation (not to delete negative reviews, but to filter spam). The main rule: respond to every review. Both to “everything was great, thank you” and to “the room was cold.” Guests who see that the hotel does not ignore criticism are more likely to book.
Multilingualism: your guests speak different languages
If the hotel is at least partially oriented towards foreigners, the website should be bilingual at a minimum. Ukrainian and English are a must. For the Carpathians, add Polish (Poles are traveling en masse after the opening of the borders). For Odessa, add Turkish. For Transcarpathia, add Hungarian.
Just not Google Translate. Seriously. “The rooms are comfortable and have beautiful views” on the website of a hotel that positions itself as premium is bad publicity. A professional translator with native speaker proofreading should handle the translation of the website. It costs money, but one foreigner who books five nights through the English version will pay for the entire translation in a month. After that, it’s pure profit.
How to lure guests away from Booking to your website
A trick that only a few people use. On Booking, the price is 2,500 UAH. On your website, it’s 2,200. The difference is less than Booking’s commission, so you still earn more. And the guest sees that it’s cheaper on the hotel’s website. Add a bonus — free late check-out or a complimentary coffee for those who book directly. It’s a simple incentive that really works.
But for this to work, the website must have traffic. SEO optimization for queries such as “Bukovel hotel prices,” “Carpathian vacation with a pool,” and “hotel by the sea in Odessa” is free organic traffic that works for months. Contextual advertising is for instant results: launch a campaign with your hotel’s name as a keyword and intercept those who are looking for you to go to Booking.
Systematic promotion of a hotel website involves SEO, advertising, and working with reviews and social media. The goal is to increase the share of direct bookings each quarter and reduce Booking commissions. You will notice the difference not within a month, but within a season.
Technical part: so as not to lie down in August
A website with a gallery of 200 photos, a booking module, an interactive map, and four language versions is not the easiest project. Don’t even consider shared hosting for three dollars. The right domain and hosting — VPS with SSD, CDN for image distribution, at least 2-4 GB of RAM. The website should open in two to three seconds, even with a full gallery. A slow website is a guest who has gone to Booking.
Here’s what’s scary — August. Peak season. Traffic is three times higher than usual. If the site goes down at that moment, it’s real money you’ve lost. Technical support for website a hotel is not an expense, but insurance: 24/7 monitoring, checking the booking module after each update, backups. A broken website in the middle of the season is a hotelier’s nightmare. Believe me, it’s better to pay for support than to lose bookings.
A functional hotel website features online booking with real availability, professional photos of each category, a map with the surrounding area and routes, live reviews, and at least two languages. Plus, a strategy for diverting traffic from OTAs to direct bookings. Without this, the website remains a pretty postcard that doesn’t earn a penny.
If your hotel or resort still relies on Booking commissions, it’s time to change that. Order a turnkey solution, and we will build a website that will bring in bookings — not just look pretty. A hotel in the Carpathians and a boutique hotel in the center of Lviv are two different projects, and each requires a different approach. Let’s discuss it — write to us.