The benefit of running a vacation rental site on WordPress? Unlimited automated bookings for $300 annually.

Renting out your property as a short-term vacation home or hotel? Exploring WordPress? I’ve been in WordPress for over three years now. And I can give you a few good reasons why it already works for many property owners who want to find a cost-effective yet powerful software with all the industry-standard features: direct bookings, channel managers, seasonal pricing, etc.

It’s not a cinch to rent out a property in the lockdown. Even though many rules are getting eased across countries, a huge number of regular travelers still choose to postpone their business trips or vacations.

As a vacation home or hotel owner, even if you are renting out a property throughout a year, most likely your revenue numbers are usually better at pick seasons. Which means the pandemic hit your low seasons below the belt!

So if you are looking to cut down expenses on your property booking site or just want to start a site most cost-effectively, I hope you’ll find some directions in this post.

Similarly to how it was before the pandemic, there are three major ways to rent out short-term vacation rentals or hotel rooms now:

• via online travel agents (OTAs).
• through your independent website.
• using both.

The first one brings your property in front of many prospective guests right away, but the fees, rules, and overall limitations of OTAs are tangible. Before the pandemic, when the economy wasn’t so uncertain, it still could get really expensive and tiresome to rent out a short-term property like a villa, cabin, or hotel rooms via dedicated sites.

The second one makes you the only boss of your business and can potentially reduce booking commissions, but it takes a lot of time to optimize it for local search, do marketing, and integrate various software.

The last one seems to be a sweet spot in terms of getting clients and increasing your revenue — and it really is. On the cons side, you should manage and optimize your listings in different places so your workload will rather increase.

Which way should you choose then?

Choosing the best short term rental website builder is hard. But in this post, I will tell you about a sweet-sweet-spot, which is WordPress.

The one that will help you run direct bookings on your website, connect OTAs, and do it all without a need to pay a hefty cost for a proprietary cloud reservation software.

And yes, it doesn’t involve coding so you should not be a tech genius to set up a site and accept automatic bookings.

WordPress is the most used content management system in the world. It powers over 30% of all sites on the Internet, making it the most trusted open-source software across the globe.

WordPress started (17+ years ago) as a blogging software, so it’s usually unknown to property owners as a suitable and cost-effective software for rental operations.

Before you even get to WordPress, you’ll be attacked by hundreds of proprietary providers selling vacation rental software (scarily expensive more often than not!).

We’ll talk about pros and cons of WordPress - so don’t think it’s a one-sided love story.

Five main reasons why WordPress is reliable for long-term business websites

WordPress is a platform that can work for any sort of business, including enterprise-grade and scalable businesses.

1. WordPress is scalable.

WordPress is popular enough to power the giants such as The New York Times or TechCrunch.

No matter at what point you start, there is always room for scalability and extensibility in WordPress. That is, you can start with a small home for rent and end up with a hotel chain site. The software is scalable enough to hold any scenario.

2. WordPress is entirely expendable.

WordPress is an unparalleled CMS when it comes to the ability to extend, integrate, and power up your site.

You can install any purpose-fueled plugin by yourself, you can hire a developer to write a piece of custom code (you can’t typically do that to the closed code of the proprietary booking software), you can make any changes to any possible behavior of your design, settings or plugins. You can, you can, you can…

3. WordPress is affordable.

WordPress is affordable because it’s oversaturated with plugins and themes. You have a good choice of quality tools.

The cost of a proprietary vacation rental software can get as much as $1000 per year, while the cost of a booking plugin (a WordPress counterpart) is around $100. There are typically no per-booking or per-rental commissions. Can you believe that?

4. The DIY setup and customization approach.

WordPress is getting more and more flexible and user-friendly in terms of customization.

You are actually lucky to start your vacation rental WordPress site in 2020 and further! Because the end of 2019th has marked a new era in WordPress. It brought the visual, block-based, modular approach of building sites (codenamed Gutenberg) instead of the old editor that didn’t do much of the flawless customization.

The Gutenberg editor will give you an easy way to build any layouts and use any content elements:

Although it takes time, WordPress requires little to none tech help in setup and general customization.

Yes, you can really do a big part of the job yourself with the default editor and popular free customization plugins like Getwid blocks (download it on the official repository).

5. WordPress is always getting new updates.

Building a site you should first assess whether the platform you chose is sustainable enough.

This is a real problem for small platforms that come and go because they can’t catch up with the changes that are happening in the tech world every day. Such companies can fade away even with a solid client base simply because they become unmovable at some point.

I was once working with a company that was selling subscriptions to a custom site builder and it (the company) just couldn’t survive in the increasingly rapid pace of changes in the tech field. Curiously enough, the company ended up moving their clients to WordPress.

Such issues are out of question in WordPress. There is always a lot of improvement happening behind-the-scenes in the WordPress industry.

There are thousands of people making WordPress more and more accessibility friendly, privacy focused and scalable. This is what makes WordPress different from many other platforms and CMS’s.

As for the cons…

What pitfalls can you expect ?

The most tangible one, I think, is the learning curve. You won’t build a site overnight. You’ll have to figure out and configure a lot of things in terms of design, visibility, SEO, etc. Not to mention the booking software that you’ll need to set up.

You’ll need to install and test many plugins, do regular maintenance checks, to name just a few chores.

You can outsource a big part (if not all) of this, of course, but these are extra expenses.

Furthermore, even a niche vacation rental plugin for WordPress can lack some features that come by default with the dedicated proprietary software. The reason is that a dedicated software company, as a rule, is completely focused on their product while a WordPress company can sell multiple different things at the same time, being pulled in multiple directions.

WordPress for hotel bookings: what are the essentials?

How does it work for short-term rental properties or hotel bookings? Let’s create a list of essentials:

• Hosting and domain are a must for any website. There are tons of options for you to choose from.
• You need to download WordPress.org free software (don’t confuse it with wp.com, a commercial WordPress platform). Quite often you don’t need to do that manually because WordPress can come pre-installed with your hosting.
• You need a theme (design), which is how your website looks on the web. The WordPress.org repository offers thousands of free design solutions, including hotel themes suitable for vacation home rentals, hotels, cabins, bnbs, you name it.

The market of premium commercial themes is even bigger.

Traditionally, commercial hotel WordPress themes from independent WP stores are jam-packed with more design variations and more dedicated and industry-standard plugins.

The win-win scenario is when a rental property WP theme comes with the plugin optimized for property bookings and online payment — the exact thing you need to run direct bookings.

My absolute favorite is Booklium — a premium top-notch hotel and bed & breakfast WordPress themes with the MotoPress booking engine built in for free. It’s your cheap yet powerful Lodgify alternative.

• If you want to accept payments and move all the paperwork online, you also need a WP booking plugin.

The best way to go is a dedicated rental property plugin (instead of a multipurpose reservation plugin) since it’s usually better optimized for one purpose — renting out your properties.

You are not spoiled for choice here, but there are a few good solutions. My favorite is again from the MotoPress lineup — the Hotel Booking plugin, which is a mature and powerful toolchain for modern rental property websites.

• You might need extra functionality cogs — plugins. I can’t now say for sure which plugins you need. Those might be extensions for regional payment gateways (you definitely have popular region-specific gateways your customers use), or advanced SEO plugins, or tools to upsell, such as property reviews or automated marketing emails. You can’t predict all the expenses because you can’t be sure what plugins you’ll need along the way.

What to look for in a rental property booking plugin? Your checklist

When assessing the plugin, you tend to focus on what real case scenarios it can solve, e.g. can it handle tiered pricing rates? Does it offer a flexible discount system?

These are important things to check, but there is more to it.

Go through this checklist to understand what you should look for in a booking WordPress plugin:

• Taxes and fees management that allows you to align them with your country’s policies.
• The channel manager to sync bookings across different online travel agents (even if you are sure you want to avoid OTAs, you can change your mind in the future, so it’s better to be prepared).
• Optimized for mobile and tablet devices (many travelers book online on the go).
• Customizable and extendable search forms and bookings forms: ask the plugin provider whether you can add custom fields to your forms.
• The ability to check the demo, see examples of real sites, and, the best way, to register a trial account and see how all the tools work (plus, the user interface, flexibility, etc.).
• Design customization. What can you change about the way it looks?
• Check whether your guests can book multiple properties in one invoice.
• Payment gateways that are available for free. Plus, is there an easy way to integrate the ones you lack?
• The ability to charge deposits, request balance payments, and handle cash on arrival payments.
• Assess how deeply you can go with custom rates.
• Tools to upsell. Can you make guests add more extras to their carts online?
• Understand to what extent you can update registered bookings. Can you switch a property or update arrival/departure dates for guests who’ve already submitted a reservation/paid for it?
• The level of client and owner email customization.
• Languages support. Is there an easy way to translate the plugin into your language?
• Portable bookings and clients data. Can you print out the data you need?
• Knowledgebase. Is there a helping center or straightforward tutorials to assist you?

Remember that you can even go with a compromise and integrate third-party booking software of your choice with WordPress.

That means you’ll have a site running on WordPress and bookings handled elsewhere (those in their turn can be hosted on your site or can redirect a guest to a third-party site).

Don’t sacrifice the power of online travel agents like Booking.com or Airbnb

Running your rental property site on WordPress doesn’t mean you are obligated to ditch OTAs. You can perfectly benefit from both sources — there is a way to tie direct site bookings with those reservations you receive on the online travel agents.

This connection is usually provided by the channel managers, so the way it’ll work depends on the plugin you use. The most typical scenario is the exchange of iCal calendars (reservation events) between platforms. Don’t worry about overbooking — the sync process is usually handled automatically, so you don’t need to monitor this day and night.

The iCal support is also a perfect solution since it uses the same data sharing format as Google Calendar and Apple Calendar making it possible to sync bookings with the help of these popular apps.

Both the WP booking plugin you choose and the platform must support iCal for the connection to work properly.

So what about a $300 deal?

Here is a rough estimate of the first-year cost that includes everything you need to start a hotel booking / short-term rental site on WordPress:

Hosting and domain: a low-budget cost is about $150.

Booking plugin for properties: depends on the plugin you choose, usually around $100. For example, the Hotel Booking plugin comes with a fixed cost of $99 per year (unlimited booking and rental units, free OTAs channel manager via iCal, all the essential settings).

WordPress theme: $60. Can be free if you get a theme and a plugin in a bundle.

I also did more detailed maths of the cost to build a hotel site in WordPress with specific tools.

You might think: Hm, why is it so much cheaper than cloud software providers? Very suspicious…

No, it’s not. There are real reasons for it:

• Highly competitive market.

WP is the most popular platform in the world. The competition among vendors is so stiff that even the best products can’t allow themselves to cross the line of a typical $60 for a theme and a bit more for a plugin (annually). You’ll rarely find an annual price over $200 for a plugin. Prices get higher if you want to get a lifetime usage so you pay just once and use the product forever.

• Deeply rooted pricing models.

Quite often proprietary booking software providers charge “as you go”, so you can expect to be charged a commission per each booking or each rental unit. It’s different with the plugins in WordPress — roughly 95% of the plugin providers charge humble fixed annual prices, very often offering lifetime licenses if you are ready to invest in the future and pay more upfront.

• You might expect more workload.

Let’s say the property management/booking software is all built around booking software. In WordPress, there is always WordPress itself as an extra thing to deal with. If you don’t have the manpower, you’ll need to carry out some research and configure a lot of plugins/settings yourself. Many things still can be handled through tech services — are you ready to pay extra?

Let’s sum up.

WordPress is a forward-thinking industry with tons of design and functionality alternatives for the travel sector, including hotel bookings and vacation rentals. It’s more cost-effective, scalable, and powerful than an average cloud software company — you can check that yourself.

I’m pretty sure you can launch a hotel booking/vacation home site with default payment gateways and the full-circle property management system for around $300 per year, including hosting.

And most importantly, WordPress is a dedicated, passionate, and knowledgeable community that is always ready to help — without charging you a dime.

Should you have any questions — fire away.