Buy a vacation rental website builder. Almost every property of 8 to 25 units should, and four builders are worth your time. Lodgify opens at $14 a month for one property billed yearly and takes no fee on the bookings it brings you. OwnerRez is $40 a month for your first property, then from $15 down to $2 for each one after it, with no commission and no guest fee. Hostaway puts a booking website inside its subscription and sells the Pro version at $49 a month plus 0.5% of what it books. Guesty gives its booking engine to every customer and charges $9 a month plus 1% of each reservation on the plan that stops at three listings. Paying a developer beats all four in one narrow case: when your business turns on a pricing rule none of that software will accept. Our own pricing turned on such a rule at MINT @Naschmarkt in Vienna, and the work came to 4 to 6 weeks of developer time plus 2 to 4 more weeks running the old setup alongside the new one, with the upkeep ours from then on.
Which one your property needs
| Your property | What to do | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| 8 to 25 units, no developer, most bookings from Airbnb and Booking.com | Buy a builder and put the checkout on your own domain | Lodgify at $14, $26, $42 or $62 a month for one property billed yearly, with a 0% booking fee on every plan |
| Two or more separate buildings on one account | A builder priced per property | OwnerRez at $40 for the first, $15 each for the second and third, $10 for the fourth, $8 each from the fifth to the ninth, and lower tiers above that down to $2 |
| Already paying for a property system | Switch on the website it includes before you shop for another | Hostaway gives you a booking website with the subscription and sells the Pro version at $49 a month plus 0.5%, plus a 1.8% fee it charges US guests. Guesty gives its booking engine to every customer and prices Lite at $9 a month plus 1%, for one to three listings. Hospitable charges nothing monthly for the site and takes 1% of each direct booking on its Basic tier |
| A WordPress site somebody already maintains | Add a booking plugin to the site you have | WooCommerce Bookings at $249 a year, or HBook at $99 once and $55 to renew |
| Above roughly $350,000 a year of bookings, with one pricing rule no builder will accept | Have that piece built and leave the rest where it is | 4 to 6 weeks of developer time, plus 2 to 4 weeks running both at once |
| Below roughly $350,000 a year | A builder, and put the difference into filling rooms | The commission you would save at that volume is smaller than the development bill |
| Not yet selling through the platforms | Neither, for now | The platforms are the cheapest way to find guests in the first place |
Every price above comes from the vendor's own pricing or product page, checked on August 2026, with the Lodgify, OwnerRez and Guesty figures read again in September 2026.
Most properties this size should buy a builder and stop there. The build question is worth your time only once a specific pricing rule is blocking you.
Before you spend anything on either side of the decision, find out whether a guest can finish a booking on the site you already have. Book your own property tonight with a real card and you will know inside twenty minutes. If a guest cannot get through the checkout you have now, get that repaired first and come back to this decision afterwards.
Check which web address a guest sees while they are paying, because it is not always yours. Ask whether the guest stays on your own web address all the way through payment, or gets handed to a page carrying the vendor's name. OwnerRez publishes its answer, and its hosted websites run on your own domain name instead of an OwnerRez subdomain. Several builders will only move the booking onto your address on a higher plan.
Three rules your booking software may not let you set
You will find discounts, payments and invoices on every feature list, all of it accurate, and none of it tells you whether the software can handle the rule your own pricing turns on. Open a trial account and spend an afternoon trying to set that rule up, on the plan you would really buy.
Setting a discount that only your own guests get
OwnerRez documents this more openly than anybody else, so use its pages as the worked example. Its standard discounts for last minute, length of stay and early booking go out to Airbnb and Vrbo automatically, and no setting holds one back. The direct alternative it offers, the host applied discount, gets added by hand to each quote or each booking, one at a time, for as long as you own the place. The discount is worked out by the same part of the software that sends your prices to Airbnb and Booking.com, so anything you set there travels out with them.
Suppose you do find a builder that will hold a discount back from the platforms. Your Booking.com contract can still stop you using it. A US or Canadian property sits under what Booking.com calls wide parity. Your contract obliges you to give Booking.com the same or a better price than you offer on your own website, your app, your phone line or your front desk, along with the same conditions and the same availability. One exemption exists, a closed rate, and it is tightly drawn: members who opt in, sign in with a password, have a profile and have already booked with you once, with the price never shown publicly. An offer any visitor can see in your booking flow is not exempt, whatever a vendor's marketing page implies. The wording that binds you sits in your own Booking.com contract and the General Delivery Terms attached to it, so read those rather than any blog post, this one included. Rate parity for a small operator sets out what is left to you.
Taking a deposit now and the balance on a date you choose
Several builders handle this properly. OwnerRez publishes its default as half the money at booking and the other half thirty days before arrival, adjustable per property, per quote or per individual booking. Set it in the dashboard if half now and half thirty days out is the rule you wanted.
When a vendor publishes nothing about the schedule, get them to open the screen where you tell the system to charge this card, this amount, on this date, and to show you what happens when that card fails. A demo will happily show you a screen that lists a payment schedule when what you wanted was the screen where somebody sets one. Keep asking until a person types a date into the system in front of you.
Producing an invoice your bookkeeper will accept
Guest invoices sit on the most expensive of Lodgify's four plans, Ultimate at $62 a month billed annually, and on none of the cheaper three. OwnerRez puts its QuickBooks connection on a per property table of its own, charged on top of the subscription. Carry the paperwork into the monthly figure you are comparing, because on Lodgify it is the difference between $42 and $62 a month.
What the six vendors put in writing
| Builder | A discount your own site gets and the platforms do not | A deposit now, the balance on a date you set |
|---|---|---|
| Lodgify | Not published | Not published |
| OwnerRez | Standard discounts go to Airbnb and Vrbo; the direct one is added by hand per booking | Yes, half at booking and half thirty days out, adjustable |
| Hostaway | Not published | Not published |
| Houfy | Its Airbnb import leaves Airbnb's own promotions behind | Not published |
| Wix Hotels | Absent from the capability list | Absent from the capability list |
| Squarespace | No overnight stay to discount | No overnight stay to schedule |
Checked on August 2026. Not published means the vendor does not put the answer in writing on its own pages, so ask a salesperson to show you the setting on a screen share before you sign.
Wix, Squarespace and WordPress, where most owners start
Most owners get to this question from a website they already built on Wix or Squarespace, with a calendar and a card form bolted on afterwards. A website builder made for shops and portfolios has nothing in it that understands an overnight stay, which is why the calendar and the card form always have to come from somewhere else. Squarespace's own scheduling product is Acuity, designed for appointments and sessions, and on the Squarespace community forum an operator had to ask how to attach a rental calendar to a Squarespace site at all.
Wix at least has a hotel product. Wix Hotels lists round the clock reservations, online and offline payments, room inventory, channel sync and seasonal rates, and none of the three asks above appears anywhere in that list. Its channel connection comes from HotelRunner as a 14 day trial that turns into a $15 a month add on, and it disables itself if the add on lapses. Keeping the Wix or Squarespace pages you have and dropping a specialist's booking widget inside them is the cheapest working setup an owner can get to.
WordPress is the other site people already own, and it holds the two cheapest options here. WooCommerce Bookings at $20.75 a month, billed as $249 a year, creates the reservation inside the store, cart and checkout you already run. HBook costs $99 once and $55 to renew, handles reservations from the WordPress admin, and comes with Stripe or PayPal for the payment. Both assume somebody keeps WordPress and its plugins updated.
What our own booking software would not do
We run MINT @Naschmarkt, 18 serviced apartments in five apartment types in Vienna, and the rule we could not configure anywhere was the payment one. We wanted half the money when the guest booked and the rest taken automatically five days before they arrived, on the card already saved.
Our property system, Hostfully, showed a payment schedule in its own screens, so I assumed for a long time that we could tell it when to charge. We could not. Hostfully had no field anywhere for charging a stored card on a date we chose, and I spent weeks looking before I accepted the answer. The closest thing on offer came from the other direction entirely. A late cancellation penalty typed into Booking.com's own partner screens got read back to us by our system as though it were a schedule we had set ourselves.
The developers came from my agency, Ekamoira, and we built the schedule on the card processor instead of waiting for a property system to grow an instruction it had never had. Stripe documents the mechanism: with the guest's agreement to that specific schedule taken up front, one request starts the later charge and Stripe handles the retries. That page opens with an early access signup, so treat it as Stripe's stated direction rather than a button every merchant can press this morning.
No vendor page tells you how long work like that takes, so here is our own number. The last piece of development we put a firm estimate on at MINT was moving our bookings from one property system to another, and it came to 4 to 6 weeks of developer time plus 2 to 4 more weeks running both at once before the old one went dark. Moving a property's bookings between systems gives you far more than a website. Somebody then has to keep your prices and your calendar correct every time a platform changes something at its end, which is work that comes round again every month.
The build paid for itself at MINT, where the share of booking value arriving direct moved from 3% to 13% between May and July 2026. One month in that quarter brought €10,616 through our own checkout, and the working is on our results page. Our apartments are in Vienna, where Booking.com applies no parity to a property's own website under European rules, so please do not lift our pricing as a template. Fullstreak, the direct booking practice Maxine and I now run inside Ekamoira, came out of those months.
What card processing costs, and who fixes things when they break
Card processing is charged on top of every price on this page, whichever route you take. Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents on a successful domestic card payment, with another 1.5% when the card was issued abroad and another 1% if the currency gets converted. That bill grows with your revenue.
Maintenance comes with a builder subscription, and most problems there get fixed before you notice them. With your own code, finding somebody to fix it is your job, at whatever hour it breaks, for as long as you run the property. Most operators reading this should put a booking widget into the site they already have and spend the saved money on filling rooms.
Settle it this week, on a trial account
Open a free trial with whichever builder you were leaning toward, and give it an hour.
- Set a discount that is supposed to reach your own site and nowhere else. The following morning, open your Airbnb and Booking.com listings and see whether the cheaper price went out with it.
- Take a test booking that collects part of the money now and the rest automatically on a date you choose, using a card already on file. Make them show you the setting itself, not the report that lists it afterwards.
- Produce the invoice your bookkeeper actually wants, with the tax broken out, on the plan you would be paying for rather than the top one.
Most people pass all three, which means the builder they have is enough. A failure only matters when it lands on a rule your pricing really depends on. In that case pay to have the one rule built, and keep the rest of the site on the builder.
If you want the builders weighed against each other instead of against a build, the field is compared here, price by price. To see what the platforms are taking from you first, run last year's numbers. Our own threshold, the one under which I would rather turn the work down, is explained on who this is built for.
If you are sitting with two vendor trials open and cannot tell which one leaves the pricing where you can reach it, book a call and bring both logins.
