Websites for
Hotels, Motels & Inns
A site for a business that pays fifteen to twenty-five percent of every online booking to a travel website — and doesn't have to.
The job
Make booking direct easier than booking through Expedia.
Built to win bookings back from the travel sites · built to win “hotels bay city mi”
What a hotel & motel website actually has to do.
Most independent hotels and motels in this area get the majority of their online bookings through Booking.com, Expedia and their cousins, and pay fifteen to twenty-five percent of each one for the privilege. The traveller usually isn't loyal to the travel site. They found you there, checked your own website to see if it was real, and went back to book where it felt safe and easy. The website's job is to win that second look: show the same rate or better, show the rooms properly, and make the booking take less than a minute on a phone.
That means a booking engine on the site, connected to the property management system you already run, so availability and rates are never wrong and nobody re-keys a reservation. It means a page per room type with real photographs, the bed sizes, the view and the square footage, because "Deluxe Room" tells a traveller nothing. And it means the practical answers up front — check-in time, parking, pets, breakfast, whether the pool is open in October — so the desk isn't fielding the same five calls all day.
The rest is being found. Travellers search for the town and the reason they're coming — "hotels near Dow Diamond", "motel near I-75 Bay City", "bed and breakfast Frankenmuth Oktoberfest" — and Google answers with a map. A properly set-up Google Business Profile, hotel schema on the site, and pages for the events and places your guests actually visit are what put you in that map. If you're a busy roadside motel that fills from the highway sign and the OTAs and you're happy with the margin, we'll tell you the site you have is probably fine.
The local angle
Every town fills for a different reason
Frankenmuth fills for festival weekends and Christmas shoppers booked months out. Midland fills midweek with Dow business travel and on weekends for Great Lakes Loons games. Mount Pleasant runs on CMU move-in, graduation and casino traffic, and the US-127 and I-75 corridors run on same-night bookings from the road. A lodging site that knows which of those its guests are — and has a page for it — outranks one that just says "comfortable rooms at great rates".
Searches we build for
- hotels near me
- hotels bay city mi
- motel near i-75 saginaw
- bed and breakfast frankenmuth
- hotels near dow diamond midland
What a hotel & motel build looks like.
The same job — get the booking, and get it direct — done three ways, because a roadside motel, a downtown inn and a five-room B&B are sold to three different travellers.
Motel
Built for the same-night booking made from the highway.
motel clare mi
Hotels & Motels
Built to win bookings back from the travel sites.
hotels bay city mi
Bed & Breakfast
Built for festival weekends that sell out months ahead.
bed and breakfast frankenmuth
And the apps behind the front desk.
Once the site is filling rooms, the next cost is the work around each stay — the calls, the requests, the walkie-talkie between the desk and housekeeping. These are custom builds, scoped and priced separately from the website.
Direct booking
Commission-free bookings that sync with your property management system.
System & API IntegrationsGuest app
Fewer calls to the desk, and requests that don't get lost on a sticky note.
Customer PortalsFront desk & housekeeping
Room status the desk and housekeeping both trust, without the walkie-talkie.
Custom Web ApplicationsRepresentative designs in the styles we build
Six things every hotel & motel site should have.
A booking engine on your own site
Live rates and availability from your property management system, two taps from the home page, finished in under a minute on a phone. No "call to book" dead end.
A reason to book direct
Rate parity at minimum, and something the travel sites can't offer — free breakfast, late checkout, a parking spot, ten percent off — said clearly on every room page.
One page per room type
Real photos of that room, the bed configuration, the view, accessibility details and the price from. It's the page that actually closes the booking.
The practical answers up front
Check-in and check-out times, parking, pets, trucks and trailers, breakfast hours, pool and hot tub season. Every one of these is a call the desk doesn't take.
Pages for why people come
The ballpark, the university, the festival weekend, the trailhead, the hospital. Each is a search with your name nowhere near it until there's a page that connects them.
Hotel schema and a tidy Google profile
Structured data for the property, amenities and check-in times, matched by a Google Business Profile with current photos and the hotel attributes filled in.
What most
hotel & motel sites get wrong.
None of these are exotic. They're the same four or five problems on almost every site in the trade, which is why fixing them works so reliably.
The "Book Now" button that leaves the site
Sending guests to a third-party page with different branding, or worse, to your Booking.com listing. Either way you've paid to send them to the commission you're trying to avoid.
Photos from the last renovation
Travellers compare your photos to the guest reviews. If the reviews mention new carpet and the photos show the old bedspreads, they assume the opposite and book elsewhere.
A higher rate on your own site than on Expedia
It happens more than owners realise, usually through a channel manager setting nobody has checked. It teaches every guest that booking direct is the worse deal.
No mention of what's nearby
A hotel site that only talks about the hotel misses most of the search. People rarely search for a room; they search for a room near the thing they're there for.
Most hotel & motel builds
fit the Growth package.
Ten pages covers the room types, the practical-information page and the local pages that bring in searches, and booking engine integration is part of the build. A small B&B can start on Starter; a property that wants a custom guest app or staff tools is a separate software project.
Every package is a fixed, one-time price quoted before anything starts. Hosting and the domain run roughly $20 to $30 a month, billed to you directly. Compare all three packages.
Growth
Usual fitFor businesses ready to attract more customers
- Custom 10-page website
- Advanced SEO optimization
- Local search marketing
- Online booking/scheduling
- Social media integration
- Google Analytics setup
- 90 days of support
Hotel & motel sites across Mid-Michigan.
Search behaves differently in every one of these towns, and a hotel & motel site in Saginaw has a different job from one in Frankenmuth. Each town has its own page on how we'd approach it.
Will a website really reduce what we pay to Expedia and Booking.com?
It won't replace them, and you shouldn't want it to — they're a good source of first-time guests. What a proper site does is win back the guests who already know you: repeat visitors, people who found you on a travel site and checked yours, and anyone searching for the town. Moving even a fifth of online bookings to direct usually pays for the site within a season.
Which booking engines and property management systems do you work with?
Whatever you already run — Cloudbeds, Little Hotelier, ThinkReservations, ResNexus, innRoad, WebRezPro and most others with a booking engine or an API. The site embeds or links the engine in a way that looks like your site, and availability always comes from the system, so it's never wrong.
Can you build a guest app or tools for our staff?
Yes, as a separate project from the website. The common ones are a mobile check-in and guest request app, and a housekeeping board that the front desk and housekeepers share. We scope the smallest useful version first, and only build it if it will save more than it costs.
What does a hotel or motel website cost?
Most properties take the $1,997 Growth build, which covers the room pages, local pages and booking engine integration. A small B&B with three or four rooms can start on the $997 Starter. Both are fixed prices quoted before anything starts, and you own the site outright.
Get your hotel & motel
phone ringing.
Twenty minutes on the phone and you'll know exactly what we'd build for your business, what it costs, and whether it's worth it. If it isn't, we'll say so.
What happens next
- 01You tell us about the business
- 02We show you what we'd build
- 03You decide, with a fixed price in hand
Joining 50+ Mid-Michigan businesses already online with us.