Making hotel reservations over the phone or through a newspaper ad may seem like a thing of the past. These days, most travelers choose a more convenient method.
Most people (69%) prioritize bookings convenience when booking accommodations, which is why online hotel booking systems have become very popular. An overwhelming 88% of adults in the USA choose to book their hotels online. As a result, the online hotel industry has experienced significant growth globally, reaching a value of $4.548 trillion as of 2022.
So how to create a hotel booking website?
- Defining Goals and Target Audience
- Planning Website Structure and Features
- Choosing a Domain Name and Web Hosting Provider
- Optimizing the Website for Search Engines (SEO)
- Testing and Optimizing the Website Performance
- Launching and Marketing the Website
How to Create a Hotel Booking Website Like Booking.com
If you want to create a booking website like Booking.com, custom development should be your number one choice.
Custom Development
Custom development is software development, in this case, hotel reservation and bookings software that is built from scratch.
Check out our Custom Hotel Booking App Development Services
Pros of Custom Development
- Customization
If you are planning to create a booking website like Booking.com, you should have bookings features that distinguish your website from your competitors. This only can be achieved by a custom approach. Creating a booking website from scratch gives you flexibility in features and overall web architecture.
- Scalability
Expanding your feature set after getting initial traction and after your bookings business starts to grow is important. Custom development gives you the ability to do so.
Cons of Custom Development
- Development Cost
Creating a booking website for hotels from scratch takes a lot of resources, including money. It is costly to build a custom hotel booking platform. However, we advise you to start with building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
This will save you some time and money and you will get to see how your target audience reacts to your bookings product.
- Development Time
It is true that it is a long process to build a fully-featured hotel booking website. Actually, it can take a few years, depending on your financial abilities.
However, starting with a bookings MVP would be quite a good idea if you are looking to launch faster. Compared to a fully-featured product, MVP development can take up to 3-4 months.
How to Create a Hotel Booking Website Step-by-Step
If you want to create a hotel booking website, follow a few steps. Check out this step-by-step guide to help you through the process.
Defining Goals and Target Audience
There might be several goals for your website:
- Bookings increase
- Revenue generation
- Hotel inventory expansion
- Website visibility enhancement
- User satisfaction
As well as you can have different target audiences. There’s always the primary one, but you can also target an additional bookings audience. Some of them are:
- Frequent travelers
- Budget-conscious travelers
- Last-minute travelers
- International travelers
- Group bookings
- Business travelers
When you understand your audience’s bookings preferences and expectations, you can tailor your website to suit their needs better.
Planning Website Structure and Features
Plan the structure and layout of your website. Include necessary features like search functionality, booking management system, user registration, payment gateway, total cost notification, and other important elements.
It is necessary to include key features like:
- Home Page
- Login and Registration
- User Profile and Dashboard
- Search System
- Hotel Page
- Accommodation Booking
- Cost Calculation
- Payment System
- Reviews
- Localization and Currency Change
- Communication
- Hotel Registration
- Admin Panel
All of these key features are described further in the article. We also provided an example for each feature so it’s easier to understand how it looks and what it does.
Choosing a Domain Name and Web Hosting Provider
Pick a domain name that represents your brand and is easy for users and guests to recall to build a strong online presence. Furthermore, opting for a trustworthy web hosting service that offers speedy page loading times and secure hosting options is crucial.
Optimizing the Website for Search Engines (SEO)
Try implementing SEO techniques to increase the chances of your website being seen by potential guests in search engine results. This involves optimizing page titles, meta descriptions, URLs, and content with relevant keywords to attract organic traffic.
Testing and Optimizing the Website Performance
Together with a development team, test and optimize your website. It should load fast, have no faults and mishaps, and enhance the user interface for improved satisfaction. This will make your customers more loyal and book a hotel faster as the website won’t have any glitches.
Launching and Marketing the Website
Create a marketing plan that includes online advertising, social media, content marketing, and partnerships with hotels or travel agencies to promote your website. This will bring new customers and remind old clients about your services. You also have a chance to gain new customers from your competitors — if you do a better job, people will visit your website.
By following these steps, you can create a hotel booking website that is tailored to your target audience and offers a smooth booking process, resulting in a successful outcome.
How Much Does it Cost to Build a Hotel Booking Website?
The cost of building a hotel booking website platform heavily depends on the number of features and their complexity. Based on our experience building similar projects, the minimum viable product (MVP) of a hotel booking platform has the following features:
- Authentification
- Search Properties
- Property
- Booking
- Reviews
- Profile
- Admin panel
- Notification
- Integrations
Building an MVP for a hotel booking website with all these features can cost about $40,000.
Want to build a website like Booking.com?
How to Monetize a Hotel Booking System
Now that we have covered how to create a hotel booking website, let’s discuss how to monetize it.
There are 2 main monetization models for a hotel booking website:
Service Fee
A hotel booking marketplace can charge a commission fee, either from guests or hotels. Booking.com, for example, charges a fee for hotels that users booked. The commission fee varies from 10-30%. Airbnb charges hosts 3% and guests up to 14.2% from every payment transaction. Agoda charges hotels from 5-10%, and Travel Guru charges up to 15%.
Advertising
Usually, advertising is the second model used on hotel reservation platforms. Your marketplace can either advertise accommodations and rank them higher in the list or advertise other services like car renting, travel tickets, etc.
Our Expertise in Building a Hotel Booking Website
Umoozi
Umoozi is an online rental marketplace that allows users and guests to book accommodations for vacations.
It was founded by a family of travellers that has explored multiple countries on different continents. They realised that most hotel accommodations are inconvenient for families travelling with children.
So, the client decided to build a secure platform allowing hosts to share their properties and travellers to enjoy quality accommodations easily.
Sloboda Studio transformed the client’s idea into an MVP Airbnb-like marketplace in just 3 months. We developed web and mobile apps using the Sharetribe platform, enabling users to list, book, pay, and review accommodations. The project reduced time-to-market and costs while integrating external payment APIs.
Moovle
Moovle is an Airbnb-like accommodation rental startup headquartered in Belgium.
The main distinguishing feature of Moovle compared to the other online rental platforms is the expanded functionality for real estate agents. On the Moovle platform, agents can not only create their own listings with accommodations but also import their properties from other real estate resources.
As a result of Sloboda Studio’s work, the Moovle project idea was transformed into a working MVP just in 6 weeks and a customer pitched the product to investors.
Hotel Booking Market
The travel industry is now valued at $1.6 trillion on a global scale.
Therefore, with more people being able to travel to the most distant places in the world, the travel industry and its each offer now accounts for one-tenth of the world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), an indicator reflecting the market value of all final goods and services.
The hotel industry has chipped in a lot towards the travel industry. In 2019 the number of hotels and resorts across the world was counted at 700 000.
The worldwide market volume for online hotel bookings is evaluated to exceed $174 million in 2022.
Note: If you have doubts about whether to create a hotel booking website or a mobile app first, here are some statistics: mobile conversion for travel bookings is just 0.7% vs 2.4% for desktop bookings.
Types of Online Hotel Booking Software
There are 2 main types of hotel booking websites: hotel websites with an integrated booking feature and hotel booking marketplaces.
If you don’t know which one to choose for your type of business, here is what you should know.
Brand Hotel Booking Website for Independent or Chain Hotels
Today having a brand hotel booking website is a must-have both for independent hotel owners and for chain hotels.
Advantages of Creating a Booking Website for Hotels
- Digitalization
By having an online hotel booking website you will be able to transfer your offline business online and offer extra services. This kind of digital transformation has touched all industries.
The online penetration for the travel industry, including the hotel market is 50%. Though even the other 50% tend to search for hotels online and then book accommodation via phone call or email.
- Have an additional selling channel
Naturally having a hotel website helps to sell and offer more. Not only do websites attract a new audience, but also help to show off your hotel, your offering, your values, and your staff.
- No additional fees
In order to post accommodation on third-party hotel booking marketplaces, it is usually required to pay service fees. These fees vary from platform to platform.
Attracting clients through your own hotel booking platform saves money at least by not paying any commission fees to third parties.
- Reducing booking misunderstandings
Using your own hotel booking website, you eliminate the chance of double bookings. Everything is centralized and structured in one system.
Hotel Booking Marketplace like Booking.com
Hotel booking marketplace or also called a hotel booking aggregator is a middleman between a hotel and a customer.
The main offer and role of such platforms is to gather information about multiple hotels and provide customers with lots of options and to compare for better deals.
The most popular revenue model for this type of an online hotel reservation platform lies in charging a service fee from the payment transactions conducted on a marketplace.
Market Benefits of Hotel Booking Marketplaces
- Bigger customer pool
Hotel booking marketplaces have a large database of customers, unlike standalone hotels. It makes it easier for small- or mid-sized hotels to attract guests through hotel booking marketplaces than solely by their own websites.
- Promotion of a hotel’s brand website
Promotion in such systems is much easier and cheaper for hotel and property owners than through Google search. A hotel gets extra visibility by the means of a hotel booking marketplace and doesn’t spend money on promoting its website with SEO.
N.B.: In fact, nowadays, there isn’t really a choice between these types of hotel reservation software. Undoubtedly, a brand website is already a must-have for hotels.
There are different channels for promoting a brand website, such as:
- optimizing it for key queries
- promotion on reviewing websites like Tripadvisor
- listing accommodations on hotel marketplaces, and online hotel reservation systems.
You might know that website promotion is not that easy, fast or cheap. Thus, for small, new, unknown hotels with limited promotion budgets, the hotel booking marketplaces become the core channel of attracting new guests.
Main Features of a Hotel Booking System
Home Page
A home page is what users see first. It provides introductory content to engage new customers.
We recommend locating a search system on the homepage. It is one of the most vital functions of booking websites. Customers come to such websites for a versatile yet easy and fast way to choose from many rooms and options on the platform.
Additionally, a home page can feature top locations and accommodations, places that were viewed during the previous session, reservations, and other recommendations for customers.
Hotels.com Home Page
Login and Registration
Usually, booking websites ask users to register before the payment process.
To sign up a user, your platform can offer them simple signup with Google, Facebook, or any other email. The same goes for login.
Booking.com Registration Page
User Profile and Dashboard
A user profile stores information about the payment method, billing address, and general information about the customer and his/her needs, preferred rooms, booking, and reservations.
As soon as users book hotel rooms, they can view the information about their reservation, payment, and can cancel within their dashboard.
In addition, users can view messages or any notifications in their dashboard. The notifications can be about changes in booking details, reminders about an upcoming trip, or the last booked day at the accommodation.
If you choose to do some kind of a bonus system, as Booking.com does, then bonus notifications also will be shown in a user’s dashboard.
Booking.com Dashboard
Search System
This is an important step when drafting a plan on how to create a hotel booking website.
We recommend starting a user’s journey with simple search variables, such as place, date, number of people, and sometimes a type of accommodation. Then, you may add extra search parameters.
Filtering and sorting help to cope with unorganized lists and give users some structure and order.
It is advisable to design your listings page in such a way that users will be able to sort and filter hotel listings. Booking.com offers filtering by:
- User’s budget
- Star rating
- Distance from the center
- Availability
- 24-reception
- Reservation policy
- Meals
- Property type
- Number of beds
- Bed types
- Review score
- Room facilities
These are not all the filters that Booking offers. Basically, in the first stage of your hotel reservation software, you should make a limited number of filtering and sorting. After receiving feedback from your audience, proceed to add what was requested most often.
Sorting can be conducted by:
- Price
- Rate
- Distance from the center
- Top-rated listings
- Website picks
On your listings page, you can also add breadcrumbs, a map view, and nearby places. A map view allows users to view hotels on a map, filter them, and have a quick view of the hotel and its price.
Agoda Listing Page
Hotel Page
The hotel listing page needs to have a full list of information on the hotel and its available rooms. These descriptions include:
- Hotel overview
- Photos of the hotel and rooms
- Facilities
- Room availability with prices, room description, and photos
- Hotel rules
- Customer reviews
- Similar options to the selected hotel
- Ability to add a hotel to the user’s favorites
- Ability to share a hotel on social media
- Number of hotel stars
- Map for knowing where the hotel is and what surrounds it
Agoda Listing Page
Accommodation Booking
Accommodation booking is a feature that allows guests to book accommodations online, such as hotels, hostels, motels, or others on a website.
For reserving a room, a user should be able to:
- Choose room type;
- Choose a number of guests;
- View the room price and the number of guests it can contain;
- View additional options for each kind of room (e.g., cancellation policy, included/not included breakfast, prepayment needed or not).
After a user hits that booking button, they need to enter their personal information, such as:
- First and Last Name
- Guest Name (in case of customer books a room for somebody else)
- Optional: some comments, planned arrival time
Booking.com Reservation Page
The next step after including personal information is payment information. Even if a user doesn’t have to pay during the reservation process, your travel booking marketplace still has to ask for payment information in case a customer cancels their order at the last minute. Doing this allows you to secure your marketplace and the accommodation you are working with.
Payment System
There are 2 core ways of paying for accommodation on a hotel booking marketplace:
- Online payment. A guest books accommodation online and pays online right away.
- On-premises payment. A guest books an accommodation via a website and indicates their payment information. Credit card information is required as a safety measure for the situations when guests do not cancel a booking and do not show up at hotels. Thus, a booking system would be able to charge a guest for the accommodation.
Note: We recommend you make sure to ask users whether they want the website to remember the payment details and method for future booking convenience.
Usually, online hotel booking systems offer to pay either with a credit card or via PayPal. You can integrate the other payment providers, like Stripe for example, instead of PayPal. It all depends on the countries you operate in.
Reviews
The importance of reviews has grown bigger in the last several years.
For example, Yelp, a top system of ratings and reviews on restaurants, hotels, cafes, and others, has seen a 12% increase in the number of reviews in the last year.
Yelp Newsroom Page
The reason for the growth in reviews is a wide variety of accommodations that offer the same experience. And secondly, fraudulent activities happen on the internet and in real life.
Reviews build trust and a sense of security and insurance. That is why you should focus on this aspect and get as many reviews as possible.
In 2020, 72% of customers won’t move on to choose until they read reviews.
In fact, 91% of millennials trust product and service reviews as if their relatives advised them.
Users see reviews when they click on the accommodation page. They can view both positive and negative reviews, and filter them by score and recent activity.
In addition, you can make a hotel’s rating system on the listings page for users. This can be achieved by users’ filtering and sorting abilities. Showing the top hotels by reviews first on the listing page by default is recommended.
Localization and Currency Change
When considering how to set up a hotel booking website internationally, we recommend enabling your platform for various languages and currencies. The best travel booking marketplaces offer over 40 currencies and 30 languages.
Note: Localization requires additional spending. Therefore, you need to determine the main target countries of tourists and start with optimizing for those languages.
Plus, your needs are taken into account whether there are only one or multiple languages spoken in the country.
Booking.com Home Page
Communication
A communication channel is an important feature to implement when outlining a development plan for creating a hotel booking website.
This feature should be found in a user’s dashboard. With this feature, users are able to communicate with your marketplace, or with the hotel.
However, all messages should be moderated by the admin. This avoids any customer leakage that may happen when offering lower prices on the website.
Hotel Registration
Hotel registration is more complicated than a simple client registration. Booking marketplaces demand such information as hotel’s general information, like a location and name, type of properties listed, amenities and facilities that a hotel offers, cancellation, and payment options.
When thinking of how to create a hotel booking system from scratch, we advise you to look at the Booking.com hotel registration process.
Such a registration comprises the following 13 steps:
- First off, a hotel company chooses a type of property it wants to list. If your booking system only deals with hotels, then this step can be omitted.
Booking.com Registration Page
- Next, a user chooses a property category.
- Then, a user selects how many hotels they are going to list.
- Confirmation window appears.
- Next, your website needs to ensure this property is not listed on any other website. Thus, you would have a market advantage. If a hotel room is listed on another website, you will know about it.
- What a user does next enters the hotel’s name, contact information, and property location.
- Then, a user adds rooms that they want to list on a website.
- After that comes a general room description and room price.
- The following step consists of including any facilities or additional services that a hotel offers.
- Then a hotel owner or manager covers the information on any other extra amenities or bed options.
- A user loads photos of the property.
- Adding information about the cancellation policy, check-ins, and check-outs.
- Processing to the payment options.
Booking.com Payment Processing
Admin Panel
An admin panel is designed to manage the overall marketplace. Company managers oversee payment transactions and other activities. Also, they monitor requests that happen on your hotel booking platform.
An efficient admin panel powered by an intelligent engine plays a pivotal role in managing and overseeing the operations of a rooms booking marketplace. With this comprehensive solution, company managers gain centralized control over various critical aspects, including payment transactions, rooms reservation management, and monitoring customers activities. The admin panel serves as a powerful tool that provides a comprehensive overview of the marketplace, enabling managers to track and analyze the platform’s performance. By identifying trends and monitoring customers requests for solutions, rooms, , etc, managers ensure smooth development operations of the system and can make informed decisions to optimize the experience for customers. This empowers companies to implement necessary builder changes and effectively streamline their processes, resulting in a well-managed hotel booking platform with satisfied customers.
Top Online Hotel Reservation Systems
Booking.com
Booking.com is the most popular hotel booking marketplace, available in 40 languages and more than 155,000 destinations. It was founded in 1996 in Amsterdam as a small Dutch startup.
Booking allows hotels, and hostels to post listing information on its website, for guests to book, and pay for a room or bed.
The hotel booking system Booking had 697 million visits to its website in July 2019. The revenue of Booking has increased a lot in recent years. From 2007 to 2019, it experienced steady growth. In 2019 the company generated $15.07 billion in revenue. If you compare it to 2007, then it is nearly a $14 million difference.
Revenue of Booking Holdings worldwide from 2007 to 2019
Agoda
Agoda is another online travel booking marketplace that offers online hotel booking services. It is available in 38 languages and has a network of over 2.5 million properties in over 200 countries and locations. The company is headquartered in Singapore and was founded in 2005. Just like Booking.com, Agoda is a sub-company of Booking Holdings Inc.
In 2017, Agoda was listed as the second-best hotel booking marketplaces by Frommer’s travel guide book.
Agoda prefers to invest in technologies, as it is one of the main drivers for growth.
Damien Pfirsch, VP, Strategic Partnerships and Programs, Agoda, said, “We invest heavily in technology with the goal of making travel accessible to more people, whether it is through our platform or our partners.”
In the last 6 months, Agoda had more than 32 million visits. Since the lockdown, the number of users decreased; however, Agoda has seen a traffic increase since May 2020.
Agoda’s estimated annual revenue accounts for more than $1 billion.
Hotels.com
Hotels is an online booking marketplace for booking hotels. Founded even earlier than Booking.com in 1991, Hotels.com shows approximately the same number of user website visits as Agoda.
Hotels is available in 34 languages and lists over 325,000 hotels in nearly 19,000 locations. The Hotels.com site estimated annual revenue accounts for $200 million.
Trivago
Here is a slightly different type of platform for finding properties for rent – aggregators. Trivago is an online hotel search website and an independent system that compares prices of different accommodations on booking websites worldwide. Trivago was founded in 2005 in Dusseldorf, Germany, and raised $55 million overall. It has access to around 1.3 million hotels in over 190 countries.
Final Words
The global hotel industry is blooming and was valued at $570 billion in 2019. In today’s competitive market, having only a website is not enough for most hotels.
We can safely say that most hotels and other tourist accommodations need to use third-party booking marketplaces. Each hotel needs additional promotion channels.
But online booking systems are not just a major way of promoting accommodations but also an alluring startup idea.
Clearly, monetizing your hotel business will be one of your top priorities, and there are 2 primary ways to do it: charge a service fee and or monetize a marketplace via advertising partnerships.
If you are considering creating a booking website for hotels, custom development is your way into the online hotel industry in case you plan a long-term project with unique functionality and the potential for scalability.
Sloboda Studio has been building software for the real estate industry for 7 years and has been in the web development market for 13 years.
It would take 4-5 months for our team to build a hotel booking website from scratch, depending on the functionality and requirements.
If you have any questions regarding the details of the process of developing and creating a booking website for hotels, just click the button below.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I start a hotel reservation website?
To start a hotel reservation website, follow these steps:
- Research the market and identify your target audience.
- Choose a memorable domain name and secure hosting.
- Develop a user-friendly website with key booking features.
- Establish partnerships with hotels for inventory.
- Market your website through SEO, social media, and partnerships.
Can I create a hotel booking application?
Yes, you can create a hotel booking application. To begin, you should design the user interface and user experience. Then, develop the backend system for hotel inventory and reservation management. It’s also important to implement secure payment gateways and integrate APIs for real-time availability. Finally, testing the application thoroughly and launching it on relevant app stores is crucial.
How does an online hotel booking system work?
An online hotel booking system allows users to search for hotels based on location, dates, and preferences. It retrieves real-time hotel availability and rates from a database. Users can then compare options, select a room, and make a reservation. The system handles payments and sends confirmation details to the user and the hotel.
To enhance the functionality and user experience of an online hotel booking system, integrating an intelligent engine is crucial. This engine utilizes a robust model that incorporates advanced algorithms to analyze user inputs, preferences, and past behavior, providing tailored search results for a more personalized booking experience. Additionally, an innovative solution should empower hotel owners with a comprehensive builder that allows them to showcase their rooms and amenities effectively, driving customer engagement and conversion. Continuous development and updates are essential to ensure the system remains up-to-date with the latest industry standards and trends. By prioritizing seamless reservations, secure payment processing, and prompt confirmation notifications to both users and hotels, the system can foster trust and satisfaction among customers.
How can a hotel reservation website or application handle secure transactions and protect customer payment information?
When making hotel reservations online, choosing a website or app that uses industry-standard encryption protocols, secure payment gateways, and complies with data protection regulations is important. These measures ensure that your payment information is safe and secure. The website or app should encrypt sensitive data, use secure socket layer (SSL) certificates, and regularly update the security measures to protect the information.
What are the key features and functionalities that should be included in a hotel reservation website?
A hotel reservation website should include key features such as a user-friendly search and filtering system, detailed hotel listings with images and descriptions, real-time availability and pricing information, secure booking and payment options, customer reviews and ratings, reservation management engine, and responsive customer support to ensure a seamless and satisfying booking experience.
In addition to these industry features, an industry leading hotel reservation website should leverage cutting-edge technology model and provide a solution of robust platform for its customers. This can be achieved by integrating an advanced reservation management engine powered by an intelligent model that optimizes room availability and pricing model solution based on demand and market trends. Furthermore, a comprehensive solution should include customers friendly website builder that enables hotel owners to create customized solutions, including listings with rich media content, allowing them to showcase their rooms, reservations, and amenities effectively. With continuous development and innovation, the platform should prioritize customer satisfaction by offering seamless booking processes and responsive support, ensuring a top-notch experience for all users.
