Dive into the essentials of building your direct booking website that converts visitors into bookings. This guide covers everything from choosing the right platform and design to integrating a secure payment system and optimizing for search engine
Table of Contents
Transform your short-term rental business with a website designed to increase direct bookings and elevate your online presence.
1. Choose the Right Platform.
Begin your journey by selecting a platform that offers flexibility and scalability. Whilst Shopify is great for its user-friendly interface and robust e-commerce capabilities, we recommend using a custom WordPress solution. WordPress platforms allow complex integrations with platforms and tools that you generally use in your short-term rental activity, such as Airbnb and Booking, as well as channel manager platforms such as BEDS24. Here is what we recommend for having your direct booking website.
2. Design for Conversion, not for ‘Pretty’.
Your website’s design should prioritize user experience, leading visitors effortlessly from discovery to booking. Thinking of fancy videos and expensive photos? Think again. A direct booking website doesn’t have to be ‘pretty’, it needs to be efficient. Always keep your primary objective in focus: having direct bookings on your website. Ensuring people trust your business, your platform, and your location is key to having travelers pay directly on your website for a more interesting price – because they don’t have to pay extra fees to Airbnb and Booking, and with increased profitability for you – because you don’t pay between 14% to 19% in booking commissions either.
When building your direct booking website, highlight the importance of responsive design and intuitive navigation to keep potential guests engaged.
3. Integrate 3D Secure Payment Systems.
Yes, you might find traveler blocked at the payment level and asking you questions about their confirmed reservations. ‘I made a payment on your website, is my booking confirmed?’ – If this question seems familiar, know that payment issues can sometimes occur, which is why it’s important to leave your contact details on your website transparent and easy to find.
But this will also help you be safe from fraud, stolen credit cards, and illicit bookings. Let’s not forget, that scams are increasing now and you need to keep payments safe on your direct booking website for both you and travelers. Incorporate reliable payment solutions to build trust and streamline the booking process. Detail the process of setting up secure payment gateways to protect both the business and its customers.
4. Optimize for Search Engines.
SEO (search engine optimization) is vital for online visibility. You can have a pretty good direct booking website, but if there is no marketing to support it being found by users, you will not have a return on your investment in this website. We always use and highly recommend RankMath to enhance your website’s SEO, driving organic traffic and increasing your site’s discoverability on search engines. It’s a tool we not only use for the SEO optimizations of a direct booking website, but for any other online business developed with the WordPress platform because it is (from our perspective) the easiest most complete Search Engine Optimisation platform out there.
5. Connect Bookings with Channel Manager Platforms.
If by now you don’t know what a channel manager is, here is what you need to understand about these precious platforms. A channel manager platform allows instant and direct synchronization between several booking platforms. What does that mean exactly? Let’s say a traveler books a 2-day trip onto Booking for your apartment listing. With a channel manager such as BEDS24 (one of the most interesting and price interesting platforms on the market), dates get instantly blocked on Airbnb too. You don’t have to worry about blocking dates on Airbnb as this will automatically be synced through your channel manager. Discuss how integrating with channel managers like BEDS24 can automate your bookings and sync your listings across multiple platforms, such as Airbnb and Booking.com.
6. Use Data to Refine Your Strategy for your Direct Booking Website.
Pretty videos, expensive photos, a VERY fancy business card? Your short-term rental website, whether used as a direct booking website or as a website useful for enhancing your property listings, needs to have a clear, measurable strategy. Always. Explore the power of analytics in understanding guest behavior and refining marketing strategies. Emphasize the benefits of data-driven decision-making to maximize ROI (return on investment). That means, if you have invested 3K in building your short-term rental website as a direct booking website, you need at all times to know how many bookings your website is bringing, at which cost per booking, which countries your reservations are coming from, which social media channel users learned about – just to mention a few that represent the base of this marketing strategy and understanding.
7. Maintain and Update Your Direct Booking Website.
Stress the importance of regular website maintenance and updates to ensure peak performance, security, and ongoing relevance. Here are CALESSIA Digital we specialise in offering this type of support.
Ready to take the next step in building your direct booking website? Visit our website development service page for expert assistance or contact us for a free consultation.
