Hotel & B&B website design: the direct-bookings guide.

The commission problem, stated fairly

Online travel agents - Booking.com, Expedia and the rest - take a commission on every booking they deliver, typically somewhere around 15% and often more once visibility programmes are added. On a £400 week that's £60 or more gone before the guest arrives; across a season it's often the biggest marketing cost a small hotel has, whether or not it ever appears on a line called marketing.

Said fairly: the OTAs earn a lot of that money. They put you in front of guests you could never reach alone, they handle the searching-and-comparing stage better than any small hotel can, and an empty room costs you 100%. The sensible goal for an independent hotel or B&B is not to come off the OTAs - it's to stop paying commission on the guests who would have booked direct anyway: the repeat visitors, the recommended, and everyone who saw you on an OTA and then did the thing almost every guest does next - searched your name.

That name-search moment is where the website earns its keep. The guest is one click from booking you, comparing your own site against your OTA listing. If the site is worse than the listing - old photos, no prices, no way to book, the usual signs a hotel site is overdue a redesign - they go back and you pay the commission. If it's better, and books cleanly, and (as is common) the direct price can be a touch kinder because there's no commission inside it, you keep the lot. Everything below is about winning that moment.

What a guest checks before booking direct

Guests are wonderfully predictable. Before booking a small hotel directly, almost all of them look for the same things, roughly in this order:

• Photos - of the actual room they'd sleep in, not just the best one. This is where most small hotel websites lose the booking, so it gets its own section below.
• Price - a real tariff, visible without enquiring. "Call for prices" reads as "more than the OTA said".
• Location - how far to the Prom, the Tower, the Pleasure Beach, the Winter Gardens? A map and honest walking times answer the question every Blackpool guest has.
• Reviews - they'll have seen your OTA score already; the site should carry its own proof too, and your Google reviews do double duty here.
• The practical questions - parking (in Blackpool, practically a booking factor in its own right), breakfast and its hours, check-in times, dogs, kids, stag and hen policy. Every unanswered one is a reason to go back to the OTA, which answers all of them.
• A way to book, now - it's half ten at night and they've just decided. If the site can't take the booking, the OTA will.

A hotel website is not a brochure; it's the reception desk at the moment of decision. Judge every page against that list - or let our free website check do the first pass on the site you have now.

Photography: the single biggest lever

Nobody books a room they can't see. Guests read missing or murky photos the only way they can - "there's a reason they're not showing me" - and no design, however handsome, outruns that suspicion. The working standard:

• Every room type, honestly. Shot in daylight with the lights on, beds made as they'll be found. Honest matters commercially, not just morally: photos that flatter beyond recognition buy you arrival-day disappointment, and disappointment writes reviews.
• The breakfast. For a B&B it's half the product. A real plate, not stock - guests can smell a stock photo of a fry-up from a different postcode.
• The building from the street, so guests recognise it from the taxi, and whatever you'd point out proudly on the phone: the bar, the sea glimpse, the parking, the hosts.
• Current. If you've redecorated, reshoot. On our plan photo swaps are covered by unlimited edits, so there's no invoice standing between you and up-to-date rooms.

A modern phone in good light will do for a start - but a half-day professional shoot is one of the best-value purchases in hospitality, because the same photos upgrade your website, your OTA listings and your Google profile simultaneously. You can see how far photography carries an accommodation site in our work for Q Accommodation - the design's job is mostly to stay out of the pictures' way.

Tariff clarity

The tariff page fails in two directions. Vague ("competitive rates for the Illuminations!") sends the guest back to the OTA, which is never vague. Convoluted - a grid of room codes, date bands and footnotes - does the same, one confused squint later. The direct route has to be the easy route, or it loses on convenience even when it wins on price.

What works is plain: each room type with its price or honest seasonal range ("from £45 per night, higher during the Illuminations and Bank Holidays"), stated per room or per person unambiguously, with breakfast's status explicit and any single-occupancy or minimum-stay terms said up front rather than discovered at the end. Blackpool's calendar is spiky - Illuminations weekends, air show, dance festivals, half terms - so ranges are legitimate; hiding the existence of peak pricing isn't, and consumer-facing prices should always be the full price, VAT and any unavoidable extras included. If you're on a booking engine, live prices answer this whole section automatically - which is argument number one for the next section.

Booking-engine integration

A booking engine is the software that shows live availability and takes the reservation and payment on your own site - the OTA checkout, minus the OTA. Most small hotels already run one without thinking of it that way: the channel manager keeping Booking.com and Expedia in sync (Freetobook, Little Hotelier, eviivo and similar are the names we see most on the coast) almost always includes a booking page you can plug into your own website.

What matters when it's integrated: it takes the guest seamlessly from your site (embedded, or a clean "check availability" handover that doesn't feel like being ejected to a third party); it stays in sync with the OTAs so a direct booking closes the room everywhere and double-bookings can't happen; and it works on a phone, because that's where the late-night impulse booking happens. Cost-wise, engines typically charge a modest monthly fee or a small per-booking percentage - dramatically less than OTA commission, which is the entire point. We integrate whichever engine an accommodation client already uses as part of the build - it's the approach described on our hotel & B&B page, and the checkout flow on the Q Accommodation build is what it looks like in practice.

If you're not ready for an engine, the honest minimum is a tap-to-call number on every page, an enquiry form that asks only for dates, party size and contact, and - realistically - accepting that some late-night bookings will go to the OTA until you are ready.

Local SEO for accommodation

Alongside the name-searches, there's a second stream of guests searching generically - "b&b near Pleasure Beach", "dog friendly hotel Blackpool north shore", "guest house near Winter Gardens". The OTAs dominate the broadest terms, but the specific ones are winnable by individual hotels, and they're worth winning because these guests haven't formed a shortlist yet. The groundwork:

• A complete Google Business Profile - the right category (hotel, B&B or guest house, whichever you actually are), the pin on your actual front door, current photos, and a steady flow of answered reviews. Google runs its own hotel pricing modules against profiles, so accommodation gets more from a well-kept profile than almost any other trade. Our Google guide covers the full setup.
• Pages that say what you are and where, in the words guests use: north shore or south, which attractions you're near and how many minutes' walk, and a genuine page for whatever you want to be found for - dog-friendly, family rooms, contractors welcome - rather than one paragraph trying to be everything.
• Consistent details everywhere: the same name, address and phone on your site, your Google profile, the OTAs and the directories. Mismatches muddy the signal.
• Structured data - the machine-readable block that tells Google your prices, reviews and location. Invisible to guests, built into every accommodation site we ship - and the starting point for any SEO work on a Blackpool hotel that goes further than the basics.

None of this is exotic; it's the same local-SEO spadework as any Blackpool business, applied with a hotelier's specifics. The pay-off compounds: every generic search you win is a guest who found you first - no listing, no comparison set, no commission.

What this costs, and what it saves

The wider market for hotel websites runs from DIY builders to four-figure agency builds - the full, even-handed picture is in our website cost guide. Our own answer is the same plan we build everything on: £99 setup, then £29.99 a month, including the design, hosting, your domain, email, booking-engine integration and unlimited edits - which for a hotel means tariff changes, new photos and seasonal offers are always included, never invoiced. The domain is in your name from day one, the site becomes yours after 12 months, and you can cancel anytime with 30 days' notice.

Against that, do your own arithmetic with your own commission bill: at typical OTA rates, a small number of bookings shifted from commission to direct covers the plan - and every one after that is margin back in the till. We've been building on the coast since 2016, we're rated 5.0 on Google, and the accommodation work speaks for itself: Q Accommodation, and the full picture on the hotels & B&Bs page.