A website is an absolute must for your vacation rental business. It isn’t ‘nice to have’ or a pretty accessory to your short-term rental business – it is how you will keep scaling, establish control over your bookings, manage your multiple properties, and clearly communicate with your guests.
Your vacation rental website design needs to make a strong, unforgettable first impression so that visitors keep returning and make you their number-one choice for a vacation. It’s also a way to give property owners a sense of trust if you offer property management services.
As a website designer for short-term rental property owners and property managers, I’ve seen firsthand how a website can transform a vacation rental business and help it stand out from its competitors strategically.
So, let’s dive into how you can create your own website that takes your business to the next level and gets you more online bookings for your vacation rental property.
What Is Vacation Rental Website Design?
Vacation rental website design combines a strong brand strategy, compelling visuals, and smart functionality to showcase your properties in their best light. This specialized type of web design creates an intuitive direct booking journey through your PMS that converts casual browsers into excited guests.
Here are the main goals of a direct booking website:
- Rank for common search terms in your blog or pages. Things like “Best Stargazing Near Austin, Texas.”
- Create a preview of the guest experience with high-quality photos, detailed amenity descriptions, and virtual tours that help visitors visualize their stay at your property
- Build trust and answer common questions upfront with clear policies, guest reviews, local area guides, and detailed property information so your potential guests feel confident in their booking decision
- Simplify the booking process with real-time availability calendars, transparent pricing, and a seamless reservation system that makes it easy for your guests to secure their dates and for you to run your security checks
- Capture emails easily to help with guest retention
- Reflect your unique hosting style and property personality through consistent branding and authentic content that sets you apart from generic listings
And, of course, the main goal of your vacation rental website design is to make potential guests want to book YOUR property over all others – again and again.
With over 5 million Airbnb hosts in the vacation rental industry, your website needs strategic brand messaging, high-quality photos, and a fully integrated booking engine that makes it easy to reserve your property in just a few clicks.
THAT is how you stand out as the perfect choice for your guests and get more direct bookings!
Benefits of Vacation Rental Website Design
You may be thinking, “I can just stick with Airbnb or Vrbo, why should I bother with a professional-looking website?”. Well, you could, but launching your own vacation rental website with direct booking capabilities comes with benefits that are hard to overlook:
- Direct Bookings and Higher Revenue: Your website eliminates third-party booking fees and commissions, putting more money back into your business (and your pocket). You gain complete control over pricing, minimum stay requirements, and special offers without platform restrictions (except those within your PMS like Hospitable, Guestly, etc, of course)
- Brand Authority and Recognition: A user-friendly vacation rental website establishes your properties as legitimate and trustworthy options. You now have the chance to create a unique brand identity and attract guests with brand storytelling. You’ll list your amenities and what your guests can expect from the experience, but you’ll also express the FEELING that they can expect to get while staying at your property.
- Marketing Independence: The hard truth is that Airbnb or Vrbo could shut down tomorrow, or they could take down your listing over a misunderstanding. With your own website, you control your marketing narrative and can implement SEO strategies to attract direct website traffic. This independence protects your business from algorithm changes, platform updates, and all other things that could affect your visibility.
So, if you don’t already have an existing website, it’s probably the time to invest in one! And if you already accept online bookings directly, it may be time for a rebrand and a comprehensive upgrade of your process and booking systems.
What Is the Best Vacation Rental Website Builder?
If you do a Google search on “What is the best short-term rental website builder?” you’ll quickly find that there’s not one consistent answer. Each platform offers something different.
When deciding which platform to build your vacation rental website on, it’s important to take some time to research the different features and functionality that each platform offers.
But one thing is for sure: you want a website builder that can integrate with your booking system.
Many people use a booking system like Hospitable, Hostfully, or Guestly. You can even build an entire website on these PMS platforms, but the problem is that in this case, your website won’t have any SEO capabilities.
Why is that important? Well, you want to be top of mind for people when they’re initially planning out their vacation. They’re probably going to look up phrases related to their trip, such as “Romantic Getaway in a Teepee” or “Luxury Vacation Home Near Lake Tahoe.”
You can optimize your website for related search terms and offer a nice little 10% off to capture your leads’ emails and get them in your circle!
So, it’s important to build your website on a dedicated website builder with SEO capabilities, but at the same time, that platform should smoothly integrate with your booking system. I don’t recommend building a website on the website builder provided by your PMS.
Why Squarespace Is the Best Vacation Rental Website Builder
You don’t want to start building on a website platform only to realize that it can’t do all of the things you need it to or is way more complicated than it was made out to be.
In a nutshell, you want a user-friendly website builder for yourself and your team, easy integrations with your property management system, and the ability to grow via SEO efforts like your blog.
This is exactly what you get with Squarespace!
First, you’ll be able to connect to a property management system (PMS) to make bookings. This is obviously one of the most important aspects of the site, and you want to make sure that you can easily showcase your properties and integrate the booking options.
You’ll also have way more control over the actual design of your website, and you can customize it to make it feel like it authentically represents you and your business.
Squarespace also has strong SEO capabilities and allows you to grow your blog and presence on Google.
Must-Have Content For Your Vacation Rental Website Design
A successful vacation rental website will need more than your property photos or a single page listing all your short-term rental information.
RESULTS THAT SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES
Download our case studies + client experiences to review the impact of our website design and brand strategy services have beyond the stunning deliverables you’ll find in our portfolio.
Here’s the content you should prioritize as you build out your vacation rental website to get more bookings:
A Page About You and Your Team
Your About page shouldn’t only be a bunch of random facts about you – like your favorite coffee order or a long list of all the activities you enjoy doing. I mean, these are fun and should be included, but not right at the top.
When it comes to vacation rentals, people want to know that they are booking from a trusted source. They need that confidence in you, and your About page is a great place to build up some of that credibility. It can also be a great place to showcase your expertise and knowledge of the area so they know they will have a unique experience.
You can do this by talking about your journey to creating your properties and the feelings you wanted people to have during their stay, showing off any awards or accolades you have received, and, more importantly, humanizing your brand.
If you offer additional services (like property management services), this is a great place to build trust with other owners so they feel confident that you are the right fit for them. Don’t advertise the services here, but help them get to know your story on your professional website.
Property Listings Organized by Location
You want to make your website as user-friendly as possible, which means keeping things organized and straightforward so users can easily see and navigate all of your different vacation rental options and make direct reservations.
For your property listing, my advice is to split it up in a way that makes sense, whether that is by city, state, etc. You can even split it by the segments of your guests: couples, Digital Nomads, or families of 4 or more.
This is an effective, organized way to ensure that all the information is clear for future clients versus lumping everything together and making it harder for people to find the perfect property. Or even worse, choosing to leave your website altogether because they feel confused or frustrated.
Expectations for Your Guests
Your website is also the perfect place to help set up guest expectations for their stay, setting the tone for your properties. When you communicate your property’s personality and house guidelines upfront, you naturally draw in guests who value what makes your space special.
This way, you get higher guest satisfaction, fewer rule violations, and more genuine appreciation for the experience you’ve crafted.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is far from dead.
For property owners and online travel agencies, it’s a valuable way to keep people connected and in your inner circle so you can share with them news about your new properties, recent openings, sales, and any other big, noteworthy changes in your business. It’s also a way to diversify your lead generation strategy.
For email marketing, you’ll first need to pick an email marketing platform to integrate with your website. If you design on Squarespace, they even have an email campaign feature (although you may find the features of a dedicated platform better, like Flodesk or Kit.
However you set it up, you want to ensure that people can easily join your email list. This can look like a pop-up when someone first comes to your website or an inline form at the bottom of your website pages asking them to subscribe.
Even better, offer them some type of incentive when they choose to sign up for your list. And definitely offer past guests the option of 10% off via direct booking.
Email marketing will deliver a curated experience to your subscribers and allow you to continue building and nurturing relationships over time. It will keep your business at the top of your subscribers’ minds and inboxes.
SEO-Driven Blog
Just like you’re reading this blog to gather helpful insights, your blog can work the same magic by turning readers into paying guests.
With the right content, your blog can attract ideal guests to your website, answer their questions, build trust, and strategically guide them to learn more about your services and become new clients. It’s the best way to integrate an SEO strategy for your short-term rental business.
For example, writing a blog post for lookout points, activities in the area, or even an itinerary could be helpful to drive guests to your site so they find you in new ways. You do need to ensure you’re writing considering keywords, of course.
A blog will also allow you to feature the area where you have vacation rentals, give valuable travel tips, and drive organic traffic to your website.
Other Services That You Offer
If you offer anything else in addition to your vacation rentals, make sure to mention it – but keep it off of the booking pages. Your guests are likely not all your clients, so don’t cause confusion.
These are just as important as your vacation rental options, and you want to make sure people know the different ways they can work with you, but be sure to make it clear and concise.
Vacation Rental Website Design Examples
Valora
Valora is a luxury short-term rental in the heart of Scottsdale that blends resort-style amenities with the privacy of a home. The owner, Brian, needed help with naming the property, building the message, and creating the unique branding for the space, so he hired Bethany Works®.
We helped Valora create distinct brand messaging & visual identity, communicating a feeling of refined luxury and a relaxed warmth. Valora’s brand guidelines now give Brian and his team clear and engaging ways to communicate with their target audience.
Southwest Wanderlust
Southwest Wanderlust wanted a direct booking website that felt like the perfect mix of nostalgic charm and modern mid-century style. They offer both vacation rentals and property management services, and it was important to make sure that this information was easy to find and that site visitors could quickly discover the full range of services that are available if they choose to work with SW.
Bethany Works® created a robust website that included everything about who Southwest Wanderlust is and the services that they offer while linking to their property management system (PMS) so guests could quickly and easily make their bookings. We used Squarespace as our website builder.
Southwest Wanderlust has properties in Arizona and California. When you go to “book a stay” on their website, you can see that this page is divided into two clean sections—one for their Arizona properties and one for their California properties.
Cascade Dome
Cascade Dome is a geodesic off-grid glamping experience in the mountains of Cascade, Idaho. It combines immersive nature, nordic finishes, and off-the-beaten path experiences, and they needed a new website to communicate their unique selling points.
Since their properties are so different, they needed individual websites for each property to set up accurate expectations. For example, we used “Part Glam, Part Camp” to help break down the amenities at this stay.
FAQs
How Much Does Vacation Rental Website Design Cost?
Professional vacation rental website design can vary a lot depending on your specific needs and requirements. Just to give you an idea, our STR website packages start at $5598 (with available payment plans).
Do I Need a Separate Vacation Rental Website for Each Property?
It depends on your business model and strategy.
A single website works well when your properties share a geographic area or target similar guests. Multiple properties can still live on the same website with proper organization and filtering options. But you might consider separate websites if your properties are very unique, target distinctly different markets, or operate under separate brands.
How to Make a Website for Vacation Rentals?
There are many important steps to creating a high-converting and functional vacation rental website. Start by creating a distinct brand identity and messaging for your property – it should stand out from other properties.
Secure your domain name and select a vacation rental website builder that can handle a property management system integration, such as Squarespace. Then, work with a designer who has experience with vacation rental website design to make all of your ideas come to life.
Can I Put My Vacation Home on Airbnb?
Yes, you can list your property on Airbnb, and many successful hosts maintain both an Airbnb presence and their own website. Airbnb gives you access to millions of travelers, but they charge hosts a 3% commission and maintain control over your listing’s visibility.
A direct booking website gives you complete control over your brand, pricing, and guest relationships without platform fees. Property owners and vacation rental managers can also use search engine optimization (SEO) to get potential guests from Google.
How to Be Successful with Vacation Rentals?
First, build a strong online presence through your website, social media, email marketing, and, if you’re okay with high commission fees, platforms like Airbnb. Focus on creating memorable guest experiences that encourage repeat bookings and referrals and stay responsive to guest communication. I also know two really great coaches in the space who I am more than happy to send you to should you want more support.
Final Thoughts on How to Create a Vacation Rental Website
So, hopefully, this helps you as you work through creating your own vacation rental website.
At the end of the day, you want to make sure that your vacation rental business has a website and that potential customers fully understand you, your business, and how you will help them.
If you are ready to take the next step and start building your own vacation rental website, I’d love to chat. You can learn more about my brand and web design services, or you can get in touch to talk about it 1:1!
