How to make a holiday rental website

1. Which domain: .hr or .com?

The domain is your site’s address, for example yourapartment.hr. Put your property’s name in it: guests remember a name, not a listing number, so they can easily type the address again next year. For example apartmansali.com.

• .com or .hr. Under the .hr domain rules (in Croatian), a .hr domain can be registered by EU citizens with a Croatian OIB (personal identification number), businesses registered in Croatia and companies based in the EU. If you can’t register a .hr, take a .com.
• In your name. Have the domain registered in your name, so you keep it even if you change provider one day.

2. What must the website have?

A beautiful site isn’t enough. Without these, guests don’t send an enquiry or the owner can run into trouble.

• Who is renting. The host’s or company’s name and contact details. Guests want to know who they’re writing to, and an online service provider must be clearly named.
• Prices without surprises. What a night costs, what’s included and what is extra, such as the tourist tax or cleaning.
• A privacy notice. The enquiry form collects the guest’s name and contact details, so the site must say what happens to them (GDPR).
• No hidden cookies. If you add analytics to the site, ask visitors for consent first.
• House rules and cancellation. Check-in and check-out, pets, deposit and cancellation terms: guests want to know before they ask.
• How to get there. An address or a pin on the map, parking and the ferry: guests who arrive easily come back more easily.

3. In what order should the content go?

Guests decide in seconds, mostly on a phone. So build the site for the phone first, in the order guests ask their questions.

• The first look. A headline, one photo and three facts: where you are, how many it sleeps and what it costs.
• In the guest’s language. Text in Croatian and in the languages of the guests who come to you most, with the words they search with.
• Photos. The best room or the view first, each one full-screen.
• Everything nearby. Sea, beach, bakery, ferry: walking distances, written out right away, without opening a map.
• Dates and price. A calendar with the open days and the price of the whole stay.
• The enquiry. An enquiry that comes straight to you, by email or on WhatsApp.

Use the same property name on the listing, the website, the sign at the door and the invoice, and put the name and place in the page title. That tells Google which search the page answers.

4. Do you need professional photos?

Not necessarily. Good phone photos, taken in daylight and in the order a guest walks through the place, are often enough.

The first is the best room or the view, never the hallway. The rest follow the order a guest would walk in.

5. Enquiry, booking request or booking engine?

On your website guests want what they see on the platform, only faster: free dates, the price of the stay and photos. There are three ways for them to reach you, and each costs a different amount of time and money.

• Enquiry. The guest writes their dates and a question, and you reply with an offer. The simplest option, with no commission, but the guest waits for your reply.
• Booking request. The guest picks arrival and departure in the calendar, sees the price straight away and sends a request. You confirm and arrange the deposit the way you always do.
• Booking engine with payment. The guest books and pays by card without you. These systems usually charge a monthly subscription or a fee per booking, which for a small place is often more than it needs.

6. How do you connect the calendar to Booking.com and Airbnb?

Booking.com and Airbnb offer calendar import and export (iCal). With your website’s calendar linked to them, dates taken in one place show as taken in the others. The platforms refresh calendars at intervals, not in the same second.

So confirm a direct booking only once the dates are closed on the platforms too, or close them by hand right after agreeing with the guest.

7. What does it cost?

If you make the site yourself, in a website builder, you pay the builder subscription and the domain, and you invest mostly your own time: text in foreign languages, photos, legal pages and upkeep. Free builder plans usually have no own domain and show the builder’s branding.

We compare doing it yourself, a booking engine and a studio, with the cost over five years, in the guide what a holiday rental website costs.

8. How will guests find the website?

Booking.com and Airbnb still bring new guests. The website works alongside the listing, not instead of it: it catches the guests who are already looking for you, those who come back, those who find you on Google by name and those someone recommended you to.

Put the website address on the invoice and in the house rules. Don’t offer Airbnb guests a direct booking or a discount for one. We cover the platforms’ rules and more in the guide how to get direct bookings.