How to Develop a Direct Booking Website for Your Rental Business

Mar 29th, 2024

A good first impression matters, especially when it comes to business. In this modern day and age, that first impression often comes from your business’s website. Vacation rental websites are no exception, especially when you’re asking potential guests to trust you with their vacation experience and put down hard-earned money on a rental.

Your website should be easy to navigate and check all the boxes to give the best guest experience. There are lots of generic website builders on the market, but vacation and short-term rental companies might be better off with a custom direct booking website.

What do you need to know about creating a direct booking website? Our guide will walk you through the reasons to consider direct booking and a four-step framework to get any site off the ground and into the hands of prospective guests.

Do You Need a Direct Booking Website?

The first and most important concept to consider is whether a direct booking site is the next right move for scaling an STR business. While short-term rental sites and OTAs can supplement your bookings, you’ll have more control and keep more profits with direct bookings.

Direct bookings allow rental businesses to secure higher profit margins, which is the best way to keep a short-term rental business thriving. They also allow the site owner to own the data from guests who choose to stay with them, making it more likely that you can market to them for future trips.

Last but not least, direct bookings help to build brand loyalty. Guests will recognize the value offered on a custom website and may be more likely to return when they need to book their next trip.

To take direct bookings, you need a place where guests can reach you directly – which is exactly where your custom website comes in.

Why Plug-and-Play Website Builders Might Not Be Enough

For most people, the first instinct is to build their vacation rental website with something like Wix, which allows you to create something in just a few clicks. Similarly, some rental management software options come with templated or starter websites to help you get started.

While these websites are cheaper upfront and save time on development, templated, plug-and-play sites ultimately hold you back from creating the robust website necessary for a thriving business. As your rental business scales, you’ll find yourself quickly outgrowing the starter site.

Wix and other plug-and-play sites offer limited options when it comes to customization. The templated approach means your website might look similar to other options on the market, and a particular design or customer experience you have in mind might not be possible. These can affect the user experience and your business’s ability to stand out in a competitive market.

Using general-purpose options as your vacation rental website builder will also make it more difficult to scale, since you’ll be bound by their rules and fees for transactions on the site. They may or may not integrate with the rental management software you currently use, which means you’ll need to integrate a potentially complex API yourself if you want ease of operation on the back end.

Custom direct booking website developers can help you avoid all those issues. They can craft the website of your dreams while you stay focused on your rental business. Since they understand the short-term rental and hospitality industries, they’ll have all the tools, features, and integrations your business needs to thrive.

How to Build and Launch Your Custom Direct Booking Website

Are you feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of creating a direct booking website without the assistance of the templates and structure of platforms like Wix?

Getting started is easier than you’d think. If you’ve created a vacation rental business plan, you might already have a lot of the work done.

Here’s a four-step framework that will take you from a blank page to a robust site in no time.

Identify Business Needs

First, start with a clear understanding of what the website needs to achieve. This might include the ability to gather customer data, the ability for guests to self-serve with booking and paying online, or even multilingual support. Any rental company with dozens or hundreds of properties will also need an enhanced search and filter capability.

In other words, every direct booking website is unique and will require an assessment.

Also take some time to identify the integrations you need, whether that means floor plans and virtual tours, chat tools, property management software, payment processing, or Google Analytics.

Integration with your property management software is particularly crucial since you won’t be able to process direct bookings without the software API integrated into your website.

Pinpoint Your Audience

With the business needs behind you, it’s time to identify the ideal market for guests. This allows you to cater to them with your website design, copy, and imagery to create a more appealing site. Knowing who your ideal market is guides website design and flow.

Identifying your target customer is as simple as understanding the demographics of your ideal guest and their travel motivations. This gives you great insight into who they are, what they need from a property, and ultimately what they require while booking a stay with you. Families on vacation, for example, will have much different needs and preferences from professionals traveling on business.

This data helps you create the perfect atmosphere in your rental, but it also enables you to create marketing strategies and websites that work.

Find the Right Team

The next stage of building a site is finding developers who understand and have experience with the specific needs of a vacation rental website. They will handle the technical heavy lifting so you don’t have to worry about any of the details.

Before you hire a website developer, explore their past projects and their portfolio to get a sense of which partner you would most like to work with. Note which features are included in the direct booking website they will build.

Some of the features you should look for include:

Fast load times that impact your user experience
Mobile responsiveness
Favorite properties for easier searching
Pricing calculations
Image carousels to display your top properties
Company branding

To kickstart your research into finding the best partner, explore our list of partners. Ascent works with several skilled website developers who specialize in hospitality and short-term rentals, so you can rest easy knowing they’ll help you build a website tailored to your needs.

Create a Marketing Plan

People need a way to find your website once it’s been created, so decide how you will start to promote it. You can run an email campaign, drive people to the site on social media, and give guests a special launch offer to explore your site.

One of the best things you can do to make your site more visible is to employ a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, which helps your site show up on search engine result pages like Google or Bing. It might mean incorporating keywords into your copy, adding alt text to your images, or making the most of your headers and page titles. This allows for more organic growth and makes it easier for potential guests to find you.

If marketing isn’t your specialty and you have no interest in learning the ropes, don’t be afraid to outsource to a professional who can get you results. All the direct booking website developers we partner with also offer SEO and other marketing services, like professional email marketing and social media marketing, alongside building the website.

Get the Most From Your Direct Booking Website

In order to accept direct bookings on your new custom website, you'll need a payment processor that can meet your needs in today’s ever-evolving lodging industry.

Ascent Payment Solutions provides the highest level of service, security, savings, and solutions so that you can focus on your top priority: growing your business. Our partnerships and integrations with top lodging and vacation rental website builders mean you can create a safe, seamless experience for guests.