Every booking you take through somebody else's site, you rent.
Website design for resorts, cabins and lodging
A listing site will find you guests you'd never have reached, and that is worth paying for. The problem starts when it is the only place a guest can book you — because then the price of every reservation, and the guest list itself, belongs to someone else.
- Websites from $1,495
- Fixed price, in writing
- Yours, including the code
Businesses this page is written for.
- Family resorts and lodges
- Cabin and vacation rentals
- Campgrounds and RV parks
- Guide services and charters
- Boat, pontoon and equipment rental
- Event and wedding venues
Close but not quite? Tell me what you actually do — the work is the same shape more often than not.
The listing site is a channel, not a business.
Airbnb publishes its host service fee on its own help pages: most hosts pay 3% under the split fee, and 15.5% under the host-only fee that some hosts are required to use. Booking platforms in lodging generally sit somewhere in that territory, and every one of them takes its cut on a guest who would have come back anyway.
That's a fair price for reaching a stranger. It's a poor price for a repeat guest who already knows your name, and it's the wrong price entirely for the guest who searched for you specifically and got routed through a listing because you had nowhere else to send them.
The second cost is quieter and worse. The guest list belongs to the platform. You can't email last July's guests about a September opening, because you don't have their email addresses — the platform does, and it will use them to advertise the resort down the lake.
None of this is an argument for leaving the platforms. It's an argument for having somewhere of your own to send the people who are already looking for you, so the expensive channel does the job it's actually good at.
What a direct booking actually costs you.
Roughly nothing, once it exists. A booking taken on your own site costs you card processing and the hosting the site was going to use anyway. There is no per-reservation cut, no per-property fee, and no rule about how you talk to your own guests.
The build is the cost, and it's a one-off. A booking system is a module of a custom build, so it starts at one module rather than a platform you rent forever, and the code is yours at the end of it.
That's the whole argument, and it's deliberately unexciting: pay once for the channel you own, keep paying commission on the channel that finds you strangers.
Those are other companies' published prices, quoted as published and checked in September 2026. They aren't a claim about what you'd save — that depends entirely on what you're paying for and how much of it you use, which is what the audit is for.
Start with one thing, add when it's worth it.
Lodging has an unusual shape — a website that has to sell, a calendar that has to be right, and a season that punishes anything half-finished. The order below reflects that.
A site that answers the four questions before anyone asks
What it is, what it costs, what's available, and how to book. Real photographs of the actual cabins, a rate range that doesn't require an email, and a page that loads fast on one bar of signal, because a lot of your visitors are deciding from a dock.
Availability people can see
A calendar showing what's actually open, rather than a contact form that starts a three-message conversation you'll be having at eleven at night in July. Most enquiries are really just somebody asking whether the week of the fourth is free.
Direct booking and deposits
Reservation and deposit taken on your own site, with the money going to your own processor. No per-booking commission, no platform sitting between you and the guest, and the reservation lands in records you own.
A guest list that is yours
Names, dates, emails and what they booked, in one place you can actually export. That's the asset. Off-season, it's the difference between hoping for bookings and writing to people who already liked it here.
Seasonal switching that takes minutes
Hours, rates, what's open and what's closed, changed by you in a few minutes rather than emailed to a developer. Nothing costs a lakes business more than last October's hours still being up in May.
One module is $950, two or three is $1,950, and everything connected starts at $2,995. The price includes the first year of it running: hosting, database, backups and keeping it working. No monthly fee in year one. After that it's $79/month to keep it running, cancellable any month. Nothing renews on its own.
A website on its own starts at $1,495. If a website is all you have, Site Care looks after it for $49/month a month, and it is optional.
The part where I talk you out of something.
Channel management across every listing site at once, and dynamic pricing that moves your rates for you. Both are real products with real companies behind them, and if you need them you should buy them. Building a worse version would cost you more than the subscription.
Questions about resorts, cabins and lodging.
Do I have to leave Airbnb or Vrbo to do this?
Can my own site really take a deposit?
When should I have this built?
What if I only have a handful of cabins?
Not quite you, or not quite here?
Other kinds of business
Towns where this comes up most
Let's talk about your resorts & lodging business.
Tell me what you do and what's costing you the most time or money right now. I'll reply within 24 hours, and if the software you've already got is fine, I'll tell you that instead of selling you something.