Direct booking websites — UK, Ireland & Europe
Beautiful properties deserve better than a template.
Premium websites for self-catering and hospitality brands, wired straight into the channel manager you already run. More direct bookings. Less commission. A brand that finally matches the interiors.
Integrated with the systems you already run
The problem
The bookings are there.
The website is losing them.
Most self-catering websites were built to look presentable, not to take bookings. They were never designed around the way a guest actually decides — and they were never properly joined up with the system running the business behind them.
Your website looks nothing like your properties
You have spent years getting the interiors right, and the site still looks like a 2016 template. Guests judge in seconds, and the ones with the biggest budgets judge hardest.
The booking journey leaks
Availability that loads in an iframe. A calendar that fights on mobile. Four clicks to see a price. Every friction point quietly hands the booking back to the OTA.
The channel manager is bolted on, not built in
Live pricing, minimum stays, changeover days, short-break rules — if the site cannot express them properly, guests get quoted the wrong thing and phone you instead.
Nobody finds you without paying for it
Your best rankings belong to the agencies and the OTAs. You are renting an audience you should own, at up to a fifth of every booking.
Services
Four things, done properly, in the right order.
Design, integration, conversion and organic growth are not separate projects. Treated separately, they undo each other. We do all four, and we sequence them so each one makes the next one work harder.
We start inside your system, not in Figma.
Before a single pixel, we log into your channel manager and map what it can actually do — rate plans, changeover rules, extras, deposits, API limits. Then we look at where your bookings currently come from and what they cost you.
- Channel manager and API capability review
- Booking funnel and analytics teardown
- Keyword and competitor gap analysis
- Commission and channel-mix audit
A brand that earns the nightly rate you want to charge.
Full-width photography, generous type, restraint everywhere else. We design the property page and the booking flow first — the pages that make the money — then work outwards.
- Art direction and photography brief
- Property page and search UX
- Booking flow prototyped and tested
- Design system, not a set of mockups
Wired properly into what you already run.
Static-fast front end, live availability and pricing pulled from your platform, and a checkout that stays on your domain wherever the API allows it. No surprise redirect to a third-party page at the moment of payment.
- Native API or booking engine integration
- Sub-two-second loads on mobile
- Schema, sitemaps and technical SEO baked in
- Analytics with step-by-step funnel tracking
The website is the start of the work, not the end.
We build the organic footprint that feeds it — location pages, guides, the things guests actually search — and keep optimising the booking journey against real conversion data.
- Content and location page programme
- Monthly conversion rate optimisation
- Rank and revenue reporting
- Ongoing platform and integration support
Platform integrations
Built around your channel manager, not in spite of it.
Every platform has its own quirks — what its API exposes, what its booking engine will and will not let you restyle, how it handles changeover days and short breaks. We know them. Choose yours and see exactly what is possible.
Enterprise-grade PMS with a proper Booking Engine API. Headless builds welcome.
Open API and a reservation widget your guests will actually finish.
Strong across the UK, Germany and the Alps. Clean widget integration.
The UK self-catering standard. 25+ channels including Sykes, Hoseasons and Premier Cottages.
You have outgrown the template. Keep the engine, replace the shopfront.
Brilliant automation. A website that finally matches it.
API-first and endlessly configurable. Perfect for a bespoke front end.
Widgets, APIs and hosted checkout — with none of the design constraints.
UK-built, direct-booking-first, technically excellent.
B&Bs, guest houses and small hotels across the UK and Ireland.
European letting agencies running 50 to 500 units.
Built for UK and European holiday rentals. Agency-friendly, API-ready.
Also working with iGMS, Tokeet, Anytime Booking, Bookalet, Freetobook, Zeevou, elina and Rentals United. Full list
The numbers
What every channel takes, before you have paid for a single towel.
Commission is the clearest argument for owning the direct channel, and the one most operators have never sat down and totalled. Here is what the market charges.
| Channel | Commission | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Sykes Cottages | 18–22%4 | Including VAT. Multi-property owners occasionally negotiate lower. |
| cottages.com | 17–22%4 | Comparable UK agency rates on booking value. |
| holidaycottages.co.uk | 15–20%4 | Toward the lower end of the UK agency range. |
| Booking.com | ~15%3 | Averages 15%, ranging 10–25% by location and property type, plus up to 2.2% payment processing in some regions. |
| Airbnb (host-only fee) | 14–16%3 | Of the booking subtotal. The split model charges the host 3% and the guest up to 14.2%. |
| Vrbo (pay-per-booking) | 8%3 | 5% commission plus 3% payment processing. |
| Your own website | 0% | Payment processing only. The guest relationship, the data and the repeat booking stay with you. |
The direct booking gap
Almost everyone has a website. Almost nobody is booking through it.
The industry data tells the same story every year. The direct channel is not failing for want of a website — it is failing for want of a website that works.
Of operators now run a direct booking website. Having one is no longer the differentiator — what it does is.
Source 2Of those operators still take under a quarter of their bookings through it. The site exists; it is not working.
Source 2Receive no direct bookings at all through their own website.
Source 2The direct channel's share of vacation rental bookings overall. Airbnb alone takes 46%.
Source 2Longer average stays on direct bookings than on OTA bookings. Better guests, not just cheaper ones.
Source 2Longer booking windows on direct bookings — more notice, better planning, fewer gaps.
Source 2Booking journey
Most sites lose the guest between ‘I like this’ and ‘I have paid’.
That gap is where your margin lives. Travellers spend over five hours with travel content across forty-five days before they book, across an average of 141 pages6 — by the time they reach you, they are comparing. We design the booking flow as the primary product: prototyped, tested on real phones, then measured step by step once it is live.
- Live availability and pricing on the property page, not behind a click
- Date and guest selection that works with one thumb
- Honest total pricing, early — no surprises at the final step
- Checkout on your own domain wherever the platform allows it
- Abandonment tracking, so you know which step is costing you
- Deposits, damage waivers, extras and short-break rules handled correctly
About
A small studio. One sector. No account managers.
Fullstay is an independent design and development studio working exclusively with self-catering and hospitality operators. We chose the narrow path deliberately: it is the only way to know a dozen channel managers properly rather than one of them vaguely.
We take on a small number of projects at a time. The people you meet at the start are the people who do the work. We would rather tell you what your platform cannot do than sell you a build that discovers it in week nine.
Who we help
One discipline, six kinds of operator.
Insights
Written for operators, not for search engines.
Common questions
The things everyone asks on the first call.
If yours is not here, the quiz is the fastest way to get a straight answer.
We build against SuperControl, Guesty, Hostaway, Lodgify, Bookster, Hospitable, Smoobu, Uplisting, Beds24, OwnerRez, eviivo and Avantio as standard, plus a long tail of others including Anytime Booking, Bookalet, Freetobook, Zeevou and elina. Where a platform offers a full API we build a native, on-domain booking journey. Where it only offers an embedded booking engine, we design around that engine so the transition still feels like part of your site.
No, and we would usually advise against it. Your channel manager is running your operation; changing it mid-build adds risk for no design benefit. We work with what you have. If your platform genuinely limits what is possible on the website, we will tell you plainly what the ceiling is before you commit to anything.
Portfolio size and how much of the journey you need to control. Below roughly five properties, a well-designed page around the platform's own booking engine performs perfectly well and costs a fraction as much. Once you need real search, filtering, map views or a checkout that never leaves your domain, the API is the only honest answer. We make that call in the audit, before anything is quoted.
Six to ten weeks for a focused build, twelve to twenty for bespoke multi-property work. The two things that move the date are photography and content — if you already have strong imagery, everything gets quicker.
A website alone will not. Seventy per cent of operators already have a direct booking site, and sixty-two per cent of them still take under a quarter of their bookings through it. What shifts the number is a site that loads fast, presents the properties properly, prices them correctly, lets someone book in under a minute, and is found by the right people in the first place. We treat those as one job, not two, which is why every build includes the SEO groundwork rather than selling it back to you later.
Yes. Most of the work is UK and Ireland, and we build for operators across Europe. Multi-currency, multi-language and local tax handling are all supported.
Get a proposal
Five questions. One honest answer.
Tell us where you are, how many properties you let, what you run them on and what you are working to. We will come back with what we would actually do, what it would cost and whether we are the right people for it.