Websites 27 July 2026, 7 min read
How much should an independent hotel website cost?
Real numbers, what moves them, and how to tell the difference between an expensive website and a wasteful one. They are not the same thing, and the cheap one is often the wasteful one.
Nobody publishes prices, so every operator asking this question is working from two quotes that are 30,000 pounds apart and no way to tell which one is mad. Here are the actual bands we see in the UK, what sits inside each, and the questions that tell you which one you are in.
The bands
Under 5,000 pounds. A template, your photographs dropped into it, a booking engine button. It will look acceptable and it will be fine for a small B&B with six rooms and no restaurant. For anything with several revenue streams it will quietly cost you more than it saved, because the parts that matter, the booking journey and the ability to change anything yourself, are the parts templates handle worst.
8,000 to 15,000 pounds. A properly designed site for a single property. Custom design rather than a theme, a considered booking journey, content the team can edit, and the technical work that makes it fast and findable. This is where most independent hotels should be looking. Photography is usually extra.
15,000 to 30,000 pounds. A property with more than one public identity: a restaurant with its own following, a spa, an events business, a second site. Every one of those is effectively another website with its own audience and its own booking path. It also covers real integration work, where the site is connected to the systems rather than linking out to them.
30,000 pounds and beyond. Groups, collections, and properties where the digital estate is a genuine commercial asset rather than a brochure. At this level you are buying a system, and the cost is dominated by how many things have to talk to each other rather than by how many pages there are.
Add photography and film at 1,500 to 6,000 pounds depending on ambition and season, and ongoing hosting, updates and support at somewhere between 50 and 400 pounds a month depending on how much of it you want someone else to hold.
What actually moves the number
Not page count. Almost never page count, though it is the thing most quotes are structured around.
The real drivers are how many distinct audiences you serve, how many systems need to connect, and how much of the content does not exist yet. A twelve-room hotel with a restaurant that non-residents book, a wedding business and a shop is four audiences, and the site has to work for all four without becoming a menu of menus. That is a design problem, and design problems cost time.
Integration is the other one. Linking to your booking engine is cheap. Making availability and rates appear on your own pages, in your own design, with the guest never feeling handed over, is not, because it involves working with a property management system that was not built with your website in mind.
The third is words and pictures. A site cannot be finished if half the content is still "to follow". If nobody at the property has time to write it, someone has to be paid to, and that is a real line rather than a rounding error.
Where the money goes
On a typical 12,000 pound project the shape is roughly: a fifth on understanding the property and planning the structure, a third on design, a third on building it, and the remainder on content work, testing and launch. The building is rarely the biggest part, which surprises people, and the planning is rarely the smallest, which surprises them more.
If a quote is almost all build with barely any discovery, you are buying execution of a plan nobody made. That is the most common way a hotel website ends up beautiful and useless.
Expensive versus wasteful
An expensive website that lifts direct bookings by five percentage points pays for itself in a season. A cheap website that keeps guests in the OTA channel costs you the commission difference every year, silently, forever. The bill is not the cost.
The arithmetic is worth doing properly. Take your annual room revenue, take the share currently coming through platforms, and work out what a five point shift to direct is worth at your commission rate. For most hotels with more than twenty rooms that number is larger than the entire website budget, and it is the only number that makes the decision straightforward.
The costs that arrive after launch
The build is a one-off. The website is not, and the quotes that look cheapest are often the ones that push the most cost past the point where you have already committed.
Hosting is the small one, usually 20 to 60 pounds a month for a property of this size, and occasionally a great deal more if you have been sold something enterprise-shaped. Then there are the licences: booking engine, reservation system, content platform if it is not yours, and any plugin the site depends on. Each is fine alone and they add up quietly.
The one that catches people is change. A hotel that cannot edit its own site pays for every alteration, and a working hotel alters things constantly. At an agency day rate, four small changes a month is a real annual number, and it is the reason so many hotel websites still advertise last winter's menu. The site did not fail. Changing it simply became annoying enough to stop.
Budget somewhere between 50 and 400 pounds a month for support, hosting and the occasional bit of help, and satisfy yourself that routine content is not in that bill because it should not need to be.
Why two quotes can be 30,000 pounds apart
Usually because they are for different things and neither says so.
The low quote often assumes you will supply finished copy and photographs, that the booking engine will be linked rather than integrated, that the design will come from an existing theme, and that one round of changes is included. None of those are dishonest. They are simply invisible unless you know to ask.
The high quote may include a photography shoot, a genuine content process, integration work with a property management system that charges for API access, and a period of support after launch. It may also include a great deal of agency overhead and a project manager whose main function is to attend calls. The difficulty is that both arrive as a single figure with a list of pages under it.
Ask both to break the number into understanding, design, build, content and aftercare. The shape tells you more than the total. Two quotes with the same total and completely different shapes are two different projects, and you can then choose which one you actually want.
Questions that tell you which quote to trust
Ask who owns the site at the end. If the answer is anything other than you, including "it's on our platform", understand that you are renting and that leaving will mean rebuilding.
Ask what the team can change without ringing anyone. Menus, rates, events and offers change weekly in a working hotel. If any of those require a developer, you will stop updating them by March.
Ask how the booking journey is handled, and watch whether the answer is about the guest or about the plugin. Ask what happens on a phone with one bar of signal, because that is where a good proportion of your bookings are made. Ask to see a site they built two years ago and whether it is still current, which tells you more than any portfolio piece from launch week.
And ask what they would do if the budget were half. A good answer names the thing they would protect and the thing they would drop. A bad answer offers you the same site with fewer pages.
If the budget genuinely is not there
Do the smallest useful thing rather than the cheapest whole thing. Fixing the booking journey and the six pages guests actually read will do more for revenue than a full rebuild that has to cut corners everywhere to fit. A site that is honest about being modest reads far better than one straining to look like a brand three times its size.