They search for the name of your house, and what do they find?
A guest heard about you from a friend, or saw the house in a photo. They type the guesthouse's name into Google. If only the portals' results come up, your house is there too, but next to your neighbours, in the same template, with the same "similar accommodation" list at the bottom of the page. From there it takes one click to end up at another house.
On your own website you decide what the guest sees first: the house, the garden, the area, the atmosphere. There is no recommended competitor at the bottom of the page.
Next to the portals, not instead of them
This is not about giving up szallas.hu (a Hungarian accommodation booking site) or Booking. They bring most of your guests, and that is fine. Your own website is for something else: so that someone who is already interested in your house ends up with you, and asks for a quote directly.
A common attitude is "we only take bookings through an intermediary". That is a workable decision, and your own site doesn't ask you to change it. The two live side by side: the portals stay, and the website is a permanent place of your own that you can point to on a business card, in a Facebook post, or in an email to a returning guest.
The fear: one more place to update by hand
This is the most common objection, and it is a fair one. If you are already keeping two calendars, a third is an unnecessary burden. A booking calendar that someone forgets to update is worse than none at all: the guest sees a day as free that is already booked, or the other way round.
That is why you don't keep the website's calendar by hand. This can be solved: the website reads the booked days from the portals' calendars, and you don't have to enter anything on it.
How the website reads the portals' calendars
The technology is called iCal. In plain terms: most booking portals can give you a secret web address where the booked days of your calendar are available as a simple text file. It is the same kind of file your phone's calendar uses to follow other calendars. The file usually contains only dates, not guest details.
The process looks like this:
- In the host interface, in the calendar sync or iCal export menu, you copy your calendar's link. This is a one-off task of a few minutes. If you use a channel manager, the portal may not offer this export, and you may also get a separate link for each room type. The exact menu item differs by portal and changes from time to time, so I am not writing a specific path here: the portal's own help always shows the current name.
- You send me the link privately. I don't publish it, it doesn't go into the website's code, and I store it in the background.
- The website fetches the files regularly with a background process, merges the booked days from the portals, and shows them as booked in the calendar.
That's it. If you close off a weekend on the portal, the website's calendar follows it as well, and you don't touch it, provided the export includes the closed days too (see below).
Two traps worth knowing in advance
The first is the Booking export. When you export the calendar, the interface can give you more than one kind of content. If you choose one that contains only the bookings actually received, the days you closed by hand (renovation, your own use, a family weekend) are not included, and the website shows them as free. And if the feed contains only bookings and there happen to be none, the file may be empty and the calendar looks empty too. So in the export settings, choose the option that contains the bookings and the closed days together, and on first setup check that the file you copied really shows the days you have actually closed.
The second: the sync is not instant. The portals don't publish the calendar in real time, and a change shows up after a few hours, sometimes more. For this reason the website's calendar is for information only. A guest may see a day as free that was booked in the last few hours. So the calendar doesn't record the booking, you do: you reply to the quote request, and your confirmation is what counts. If you know this in advance, you won't be surprised, and neither will your guests: the calendar is a guide, not a contract.
What is on a site like this, and what isn't
What is there: a presentation of the house with photos, the area, the availability calendar, and a quote request form where the guest gives the dates, the number of people and their email address. The quote request arrives to you by email.
What isn't there: online payment, and two-way booking. The website reads the portals' calendars, but doesn't write back into them. That means if a booking comes in from your own site, you have to close the dates by hand on the portals, so that nobody can book the same period there either. It is one extra step on the portals' interface, but it is important to know about. If you later need real two-way sync, that is what channel manager software provides, and it is a different budget and a different job.
It is a deliberately simple solution: fewer moving parts, fewer things that can break.
How it works, and what it costs
The process is the same as with all my work: we talk, you get a written quote at a fixed price, and we start with a contract and a 50% deposit. You can follow the progress, and I don't disappear for weeks. At handover we go live, and I show you how to manage the site.
For an introduction website, the calendar sync comes as a separate line item, an extra, because it is a small program of its own: every half hour it fetches and merges the portals' calendars, and it signals if one of the sources stops working. Online booking and payment are not included, which is why it is not custom development. You get the exact price in writing after we have talked. You can find the basic prices and what a website's price depends on in the article about website prices. That the process works like this in practice, you can see in the GMN-Color case study: there the site went from contract to launch in 13 days, with a quote request form.
If so far you only have a Facebook page and are wondering whether you need a website at all, I wrote about that in detail in this article.
If you want your own site next to the portals
Tell me via killes.dev/en which portals you are on and what you want from the website. We'll look at what would fit, and you get a quote at a fixed price.