If you’re operating a hotel, bed & breakfast or vacation rental home, then you understand how important it is to have a website not only to showcase your properties to potential renters, but also offer them an easy way to book / reserve a unit and an easy way for you to collect payments.
There are a number of options for you if you want to create a bed and breakfast hotel website – and most of them are quite expensive.
You can hire a designer and coder to custom-build a website for you, but that will run you into the thousands of dollars very easily (and quickly). And if you want to make any edits, it will cost you more money.
There are services out there that offer you a setup fee that runs from hundreds of dollars to a couple of thousands of dollars, then a recurring monthly fee to keep the website up.
It almost feels as if you have to pay an arm and a leg, and / or be held hostage to pricey developers or programs just to have a B&B / hotel website so you can grow your business.
But, with the help of website builders, for example Wix, you can build your own hotel website cheaply and quickly by dragging and dropping text, images, slideshows, contact forms, maps and more into your site. Keep reading to find out how!
How To Create Your Own Hotel Website Cheaply And Easily
The answer is using a website builder! These are user-friendly tools that allow you to create a website without needing to know even one single line of code.
They host your website for you, and you don’t have to worry about anything else other than running your business. Let’s just say they’re non-tech people friendly!
Check out this table of our favorites:
These website builders don’t cost thousands of dollars to set up – their monthly plans usually start from around $5 and go up to around $25. Why? Well, it’s because you’ll be building it yourself (it’s quite easy, relatively fast, and fun too).
But you need more than just the ability to build a website yourself without any codes. You need hospitality related tools to power your business.
What About Room Reservation Systems & Payment Tools To Help Me Manage?
Yes, these drag & drop website builders enable you to easily create your own site without hiring costly developers.
But what’s missing?
The challenge is that not all website builders offer you an automated, stylish and functional way to offer your hotel / bed & breakfast units to your potential customers!
Sure you can drag in an image of your room, then insert an “add to cart” ecommerce button. But what about reservation systems for you to manage bookings and room inventory?
What about taking reservations 24/7 on your behalf? What about an attractive property / room description layout so your website actually looks like a professionally built hotel website? What about automated emails to notify your customers about their bookings?
You need an easy to use website builder that includes bed & breakfast hotel related tools, and this is where Wix comes in.
Build And Manage Your Hotel Website With Wix Hotels
Wix offers you a very economical and easy way to build a website to showcase your hotel and rooms to potential customers. It comes in the form of an app that you add onto your website, and is called ‘Wix Hotels.’
Wix is great as it offers you an internal reservation system to help you manage your bookings and collect payments, while also powering your website.
Before we delve deeper into the features that can help make your life a lot easier in operating your bed & breakfast / hotel business, here’s a short video that will show you what Wix can do for you:
What really rocks is that Wix has over 500 premium templates for you to choose from, and in among these, they have a lot of great looking hotel / bed & breakfast focused templates.
One of the first steps you’ll need to take when creating your bed & breakfast website is picking a template. Then you’ll need to customize it by dragging and dropping elements and populating it with your own content. After that, you’re almost there!
Here’s an example of a hotel website that was built using Wix’s builder:
I’ll go into more detail about how simple it is to use in just a minute.
The burning question in your mind is – how much? Right? Cost is an important factor to consider in business, so let’s get right into this.
How Much Does It Cost To Build A Hotel Website With Wix?
Wix is absolutely free for you to try (to test drive to see if you like their user interface).
This is quite important (just so you get comfortable with what you’re getting into). It’s also good to know that they don’t impose any time limits to your trial – so you can create a fully functioning website for free, without having to rush.
To access more web building tools, and to be able to use your own domain name, you can upgrade to their premium plans.
Take a look at the benefits of upgrading to a more comprehensive plan:
There are a few plans, ranging from $5 per month to $25 per month, depending on what you need.
Keep in mind that you can always upgrade if you need more, downgrade if you need less, or even cancel. So you’re not tied up in a long-term contract in any way.
Check out a more detailed version of what you get with each plan:
You can add the Wix Hotels app onto your website for free. If you want to upgrade to a premium version of the app and gain access to more advanced features to improve your hotel’s website, the price is $9.99 a month.
It’s important that you add the app to your website to transform it from a normal website to one that enables you to power your hotel / bed & breakfast business.
Even if you add on the monthly fee of using Wix (from $5 to $25 per month), it’s not a very expensive tool to power your online booking system.
Now that we know that Wix is a much cheaper alternative to other solutions, such as hiring a designer, let’s get into what you get with Wix Hotels (to see if it can actually work for you).
3 Steps To Creating Your Hotel Website With Wix Hotels
We’ve seen in an image above what your website can potentially look like, but how do you actually go about it?
One thing to know is that Wix is very flexible when it comes to dragging and dropping content around your website. So you can definitely style / design your website the way you want to, changing colors, font styles, images, to reflect your brand – all by a few mouse clicks without ever touching codes.
Creating your bed and breakfast / hotel website with Wix is relatively straightforward – there are 3 main steps:
Step 1: Adding Rooms
When you are adding rooms to your website in Wix, you can name your rooms (i.e. Deluxe, Twin), add the number of guests, room size, the number of beds and room descriptions.
You can also outline what sort of amenities come with each room. As you know, this very important when it comes to selecting hotels – at least that’s one of the first things I look for when I reserve rooms!
Next, it’s time to upload photos of your rooms, you can upload up to 10 for each. Make sure you upload very high-quality images!
Lastly, you can insert your room prices. Wix Hotels allow you to set different rack rates for weekdays and weekends. You can also set up weekly and monthly rates for rooms if you have more long term guests.
You even have the ability to control seasonal prices as well!
Step 2: Editing Settings
You need to make sure your guests can find you, so in this step you need to add the address of your property and your contact details.
The contact information you input will automatically appear in your guests’ booking confirmation emails – a really helpful feature from Wix here.
Step 3: Setting Up Payments
Wix offers you 4 ways to get paid:
- PayPal
- Stripe
- Mercado Pago
- Offline payments
When a guest makes an online reservation with your website, you can choose to collect payment up front using PayPal, Stripe (also a very popular payment processor), or Mercado Pago (to accept payments from a number of Latin American countries).
These are tightly integrated with Wix Hotels so you don’t have to worry about the technical side of things.
There is also an option to get offline payments. This way, your guests don’t settle the bill until they arrive. It’s really up to you which option you like to have.
You can also add in taxes to your bookings as well.
What Features Do You Get With Wix Hotels?
Reservations Calendar
Here is what your backend reservation will look like. The reservation system is automatically updated when someone makes a booking, or you can manually insert reservations.
Room Search Bar
An important and useful tool that Wix offers you is a search bar that’s dedicated for your potential guests to quickly find available rooms for their travel dates.
This offers two main benefits – provides great user experiences where your guests can quickly find available rooms, and you don’t have to answer emails or phone calls from people asking you if there is anything available!
All the data is automatically updated, which can free up so much of your time and automatically provide your visitors with accurate information.
There are also multiple design options to choose from so you can customize your hotel website to look exactly how you want.
For example, you can move the search bar from horizontal to sideways and place it either side of the page.
Wix also offers you the ability to style the format of the search bar (date format, font color, font style, font size, background, etc).
Newsletter
One of Wix’s helpful tools, Wix ShoutOut, enables you to send your guests newsletter updates.
Once your guests book rooms, you’ll have their email address in your Wix system. Here, you can use Wix ShoutOut (Wix’s newsletter service which you can use for free) to email them about any new updates about your hotel / bed & breakfast, special promotions, or just to keep in touch.
We all know that the easiest way to grow your business is to get repeat customers!
Moreover, your newsletter recipients can also forward your newsletter to their friends and family! That’s an absolutely free way to get some trusted marketing without costing you a pretty penny.
Wix ShoutOut allows you to style your email newsletter so you can maintain your brand identity in your newsletters.
Mobile Friendly
Wix and its Wix Hotels tools are mobile friendly. What this means is that your visitors can book rooms with any device that’s connected to the internet.
They can use their computer desktop, tablets, or mobile phones.
They can also make reservations 24/7 a day. They can check for availability, review room details, and reserve and pay for the rooms – even when you’re not working (or when you’re sleeping!)
The platform powers everything on the internet for you.
Integration With TripAdvisor
Wix Hotels allows TripAdvisor’s visitors to book rooms to your hotel, directly on TripAdvisor’s website. This enables you to grow your business by acquiring more bookings directly from the world’s largest travel website.
With Wix Hotels, you can also tap into TripAdvisor’s price search results, to further help you promote your business. This feature is available to you with Wix Hotels without you messing around with complicated setup procedures. Wix has done most of the hard work for you!
How To Build A Bed And Breakfast Hotel Website: Conclusion
Using Wix and its Wix Hotels add-on gives you the most control over your business website (without the need to have any technical skills), and is the most economical in the long term for your business.
You don’t need to hire anyone to create the site for you, you don’t need to pay them for making tiny changes that you can quickly do yourself. Getting things done is just so much faster this way.
Wix enables you to build a full website about your business, and its Wix Hotels tool allows you to take reservations online and collect payments 24/7, automatically. Your guests can search for available rooms by date, and your inventory is always updated.
Gone are the days where you have to rely on expensive service providers that respond very slowly when you need to update details about your rooms or businesses.
With Wix, you can just log into your website, and make those changes easily by yourself.
Hi, thanks for the blog, but do u by anychance know what kinda promotions you can do? cause we are planning on having promotions ie. 3days2nights with breakfast and lunch etc. but can’t seen to find anyways to so it on wix? issit even possible?
Hi Nicholite,
I think it’s possible to create a coupon in a Wix Hotels site. This page on the Wix website might be useful: https://support.wix.com/en/article/creating-coupons-in-wix-hotels
Hope it helps!
Fred
Wix has a long way to go in this space before they are competitive in this area. Using their system you cant make a booking for more than one room at a time or check availability of mutiple rooms. And the channel manager they use to connect to Booking.com etc doesn’t work properly and I had major overbooking issues and apologies to clients to make. It’s improving but not quite there yet. I’d go with a wordpress plugin.
I built an entire booking site using Wix for a client and eventually we scrapped it all and found another route.
But I’m sure this site is managed by Wix and so my comment won’t be posted anyway. Ta Da!
Hi Simon,
Thanks for your comment and addressing this with the rest of the community. Using Wix Hotel functionality is a great way to manage your bookings, however to explore the availability concern Wix has previously suggested that you try to use the new repeater elements under ‘Lists & Grids’ which would allow you to design each element to look like a calendar/day entry. Nevertheless, Wix as you have identified may not always be the best solution for you with other alternative such as the suggested wordpress plugin. Thanks for sharing your experience with everyone!
Natasha.
Very good information! Thank you! Do you happen to know if it is possible to include the sales tax into the price the guest sees? I am from Germany and the legal requirement for us here is to have the tax included in the price.
Thank you
Hi Miranda,
Good to hear you found the discussion useful.
I believe you can display sales tax alongside the price that a guest will see.
You can achieve this by going into the ‘Store Manager’ on your Wix dashboard, then heading to the ‘settings’ under ‘Business Setup’.
Scroll down to ‘Orders’ and select or deselect ‘Tax is included in the price of my products’.
Wix have more info here for you.
Thanks for reading,
-Tom
Helpful with useful information.helped me to make my mind .
Tq : )
Hi Mahi,
Glad you found the discussion and information useful.
Feel free to give us a share on social media using the buttons above – you never know who else might benefit!
– Tom
Hello Jeremy, very good and informative post ! Do you know if I can add trackers on the website such as google analytics to be able to have an overview about my customers behavior ?
Hey Rabih,
You can add Google Analytics to your site as long as you are subscribed to a premium plan.
You can set it up via the Analytics tab under ‘Domains’ in your Wix user panel, where you can paste your Google Analytics tracking code (which you can get from the ‘Property’ tab in your Google Analytics dashboard)
– Tom
can wix also talk to other websites on bookings ,if i want to also use other site engines to take bookings like another host or Air bb
Johnz,
I’m not entirely sure. I think WixBookings works on its own so it may not be able to communicate with other search engines.
Jeremy
In the offline payments, is there a way to collect credit card information from guests in order to hold their reservation? Would I create a form? I would also need a SSL. Does Wx offer that?
Hey Terri,
I’m not sure if there is an automated way to collect credit card information. Perhaps what you can do is send out a follow up email automatically with Wix Shoutout and tell them to provide credit card information. Just as a workaround that might just work.
Further, it’s a good habit to start collecting your visitors’ email addresses (using Wix Shoutout as mentioned) so you can send them promotion / marketing details, etc. Or even provide helpful information about what to do around the hotel / destination. These are all value added services / information that I’m sure your visitors will appreciate and will help you build your brand!
Wix doesn’t offer SSL for all webpages, but in the ecommerce check out pages, where sensitive information is exchanged, SSL is available (provided by the payment processor,such as PayPal).
Jeremy
We found some important limitations in Wix-Hotel.
We are renting holiday flats only on a monthly basis and not on a daily basis.
We wanna show on the website only the month price and not a day price within the “room-price bar”.
Unfortunately it seems that is not possible with WIx Hotel.
Wix Hotel displays and calculates by its one in the room-price bar a day price.
So it seems that for “holiday apartment”, which are renting on a weekly or monthly basis, Wix Hotel is not suitable. Or at least we did not found out how to accomplish it.
Hi Antonino,
Did you ask Wix’s support team to see if this is possible?
I suppose each tool will have its own set of limitations, so it’s a matter of finding the right one that works for you. With a monthly rental arrangement, it might be worthwhile to consider asking your prospective customers to just email you dates. The booking software is most effective for managing short term rentals, as there is a much larger group of people looking for short term rentals, instead of monthly.
Thanks for sharing this piece of information, though.
Jeremy
Thanks Jeremy! Very informative. I rent cottages, and assume I can just add each of my 8 cottages at my resort as a “room” using this. My question is this: We only rent by the week, not by the day. Is there a setting in booking that will allow us to dictate weekly (or weekend in the off-season) rentals instead of days/nights?
Hi MD,
I’m not 100% sure, actually. Best way to see is to set up a free account and add the Wix Hotel App and see if you can configure the rules in a way to suit your offerings. You’ll also get some hands-on experience to determine if Wix works well for your needs.
Good luck!!
Jeremy
This all sounds really good, but I have a question: What is the time lapse/overlap between a customer online making a reservation if I am working with a client on the phone for the same day and time of reservation? In other words, will I be making a reservation during a time delay for the online customer to reserve the same day and time?
Hi Chuck,
I think if someone makes an online reservation, the booking is pretty much instant. So if you are arranging a booking with someone on the phone, you might want to refresh your schedule to see if someone just happened to make a booking online, for the same day. Chances are probably pretty low, but I guess it does happen!
Jeremy
Just started to use Wix for our website and Wix Hotel for the reservation. BUT how can we add additional services i.e. transportation to / from airport, tours, full breakfast options, a lunch box, etc etc?
Thanks
Hey JS,
Have you tried setting those services up as products that you can sell, that’s separate from the booking system that WixHotels offers?
So when people book a room with your hotel, you can email them directly using tools such as WixShoutout and offer them your other services. You can set those services up as ecommerce products using Wix, and sell them that way.
Jeremy
Hi Jeremy,
Thanks for the text. Can i add different B&B’s? Up to what number of accomodations or rooms can i add to wix hotels? and will the reservations by customer updated in the website and will be showing to other customers that the room is available or not? without my manual update?
Hello Merry,
I believe it’s one B&B / Hotel per website. But do ask Wix’s support team just to be sure, as I’m not 100% certain.
I don’t think there are room limitations, and room availability should be updated right after your customer successfully books and pays.
Here is the direct link to the App. There are more details there, including an overview video.
Jeremy
Hi Merry,
Just as an update to my answer to your question – you can insert multiple locations with Wix Hotels. You can insert multiple addresses!
Hope this helps.
Jeremy
if i have 4 hotels at different location & i want to operate it with single website, is it possible?
if there is an location option before check in space that would be better.
Hi Mohan, this depends on the platform you’re using. The Wix Hotels app overview has some useful information – https://www.wix.com/app-market/wix-hotels/features
Hi,
I am planning to sign-up and WiX Hotel accommodations template but it’s specific to just one hotel only. Is there a template where I can add more hotels into a template and configure it?
What I would like to publish is a booking website that a user can search a hotel then book eventually.
Thanks for your support.
Hi Jiggy,
I don’t think you can add more hotels at the moment. WixHotels is not set up to run like a Expedia type website where you can promote multiple hotels. It’s is built for single hotel operators.
If you are operating 2 or more hotels, try this workaround. Create 3 websites – one for each hotel, and the last one is an “overview” website where you introduce your portfolio of hotels. So get people to the overview website, then let them pick a hotel that suits them.
Just something to consider.
Jeremy
Hi Jeremy,
very good post. Maybe you could had something about the language possibilities offered by the Wix widgets to allow multi-language website creation. As a translator, I know it is also a very interesting feature for innkeepers who want to access international customers. And it is quite easy to implement with Wix.
Catherine from We Translate USA, LLC
Hi Catherine,
We have another post here about multiple language websites. Hope this helps!
Jeremy
Jeremy,
Thank you SO much for this information…it’s just what I needed.
You’ve taken out so much of the unknown in starting a website for we ‘mom & pop’ setups by sharing your knowledge in your easy, concise and very informative writing.
I tried to pin this directly from the Pinterest button on the bottom, but it wouldn’t let me. I’ll try to tweet it next! Thanks again!
Hi Angelia,
Thanks so much for your feedback! Glad you found our discussion here helpful.
I just tested the Pinterest button and it worked for me. Strange. Give it a try again (make sure you’re logged into your Pinterest account) and see how it goes. If not, sharing this article through other social channels will also be very helpful to us in getting the word out!
Thanks so much again!
Jeremy
Hi Jeremy, great review… just what I was looking for!
Would this work in the UK using £ Sterling or is it $ only?
Many thanks
Hi Graham,
I think you can select your currency. Wix is actually a company based out of Israel, but they are also listed as a publicly traded company in the US. So in a way they’re quite global and so you should have the flexibility to select your own currency.
Jeremy
Hi Jeremy,
Great article!
I was wondering if Wix Hotel accepts Credit Cards. We usually take a deposit upon booking, and would hate to have to have people call us to complete the transaction.
Thank you!
Elana
Hello Elana,
Yes. Wix can connect to several payment processors that can accept credit cards.
If you are still uncertain, feel free to sign up to a free Wix account and check them out, or contact their support team to confirm directly with them!
Jeremy