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Websites, software and maintenance

Websites for hotels and resorts

Every booking that comes through an aggregator costs you between fifteen and twenty five per cent. Your own website is the only channel where that number is zero.

The guest has already seen you elsewhere

Most guests find a hotel on a booking site, then search its name to check it is real. What they find at that moment decides whether they book direct or go back and pay the commission. For a hotel here the season is Puri, Konark and Rath Yatra, and the enquiry arrives weeks before the stay.

That means your site is not competing on discovery. It is competing on trust, and on being easier than going back.

A page for each room type

A single page listing five room types cannot rank for any of them, and cannot show enough photographs of any of them. A page each can: the actual room, the actual view, the actual bathroom, what is included, and how many people it sleeps.

Guests compare rooms, not hotels. Give them something to compare.

The commission arithmetic

Take a hotel doing forty direct-eligible bookings a month at ₹4,000 a night. At eighteen per cent commission that is about ₹28,800 a month, so a five month season pays out roughly ₹1,44,000. The Pro build is ₹60,000.

The site does not have to win every booking to pay for itself. It has to win the guests who were already coming, and those are the ones searching your name.

Photographs are the product

A hotel site lives or dies on photographs. Wide, bright, and of the room a guest will actually get, not the suite. One good photographer for one day is worth more than anything else on this page.

We will tell you which shots you are missing before we build anything.

Direct booking, or direct enquiry

A full booking engine with live availability makes sense above a certain size. Below it, an enquiry form with dates and room type, answered within the hour, converts nearly as well and costs far less to run.

We will be honest with you about which side of that line you are on.

Reviews, and what to do about them

You cannot control reviews and you should not try. What you can control is what a guest sees immediately after reading a bad one, which is usually your own website.

A site that shows the room honestly, prices clearly and answers the complaint the review made, before anybody asks, defuses most of it. If three reviews mention the road at night, put the road at night on the directions page and say what you have done about it. Guests forgive a known problem far more easily than a hidden one.

What it costs

A hotel site with a page for each room type, an enquiry form, offers and proper directions is a Pro plan: ₹60,000 to build and ₹36,000 a year. Add a booking engine with live availability and payments and it becomes a Store build at ₹90,000, then ₹60,000 a year.

Prices do not include GST.

If the site wins back even a few bookings a season it has covered the yearly fee, though that depends on your occupancy rather than on us. That is the calculation worth doing before you decide which of the two you need.

  • What these businesses tell us

    • Every booking pays commission to an aggregator
    • Guests check the site, then book elsewhere anyway
    • Photographs are dark, old, or of the wrong room
    • No page for any individual room type
  • What the site needs

    A page per room type, with its rate

    Shows the actual room, the view and the bathroom, plus what is included and how many it sleeps.

    An enquiry form with dates and room type

    Arrives with everything you need to quote. It can be swapped for live availability and payment when your volume justifies it.

    A directions page with travel times

    Covers the run from the station and the airport, and from Puri and Konark, so a guest knows what the journey involves.

    An offers page you edit yourself

    Somewhere to point a seasonal advert, changed from your own desk when the package or the rate changes.

    Photographs sized for a weak connection

    Your rooms appear quickly on patchy mobile data instead of leaving a guest looking at a blank space.

  • Most of these start on the Pro plan. See the plans

  • Questions people ask

    Can we take payments on the site?

    Yes, with UPI, card and net banking. Whether you should depends on your cancellation policy and your size. A deposit is often the better middle ground.

    Will this stop guests using booking sites?

    No, and it should not. The aim is that the guests who were going to come anyway book direct, and you keep the commission on those.

    Do you arrange photography?

    We do not shoot it ourselves, but we will tell you exactly which photographs are missing and what each one needs to show. Most hotels already have a photographer they have used.

    What happens in the off season?

    The offers page is the one you change. It is built so you can put up a monsoon or weekday rate yourself, without ringing us.

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