For about nine years, the Hotel Harmony website in Ghent did not change. It had been built in WordPress by an agency and paid for. The problem was that nobody on a reception team can be asked to learn WordPress, so the site just stayed as it was. By the time it was rebuilt, the most recent thing on the homepage was a blog post from March 2022.
No quote Harmony ever received had a line for that.
Hotel website cost is usually discussed as a single number: what you pay to get a site built. That number is real, and this piece gives you every published range we could find. But the build fee is the smallest cost on the list, and the largest one rarely appears in euros at all.
A note on where these numbers come from
Every published hotel website cost range we found was written by someone who sells hotel websites. That includes the agencies, the builders and, further down this page, us.
We looked for a neutral benchmark and could not find one. The most-quoted candidate, Clutch's 2025 survey of small business websites, turns out to contain no cost figures at all, despite several agency blogs citing it for one. So the ranges below are attributed to the vendor who published them, with that vendor's interest stated. The general builders, Squarespace and Wix, are the one exception: their pricing pages are primary sources with no stake in the hotel category.
Read every number here, including ours, as a claim from someone with something to sell. Then check it.
Decide what the site has to do before you ask what it costs
Price is the second question. The first is what the site is for, because the four routes below are good at very different jobs.
A hotel website in 2026 has three jobs. It has to rank in Google for your name, your street and your city. It has to be readable by AI assistants, which now send real traffic: at Hotel Harmony, more than one visit in ten to the rebuilt site arrives through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot or Gemini, making AI assistants its third biggest traffic source behind organic search and direct. And it has to take a booking without handing the traveller to a checkout that looks like a different company.
A site that does the first job and neither of the others is a brochure, whatever it cost.
The four routes, side by side
| Route | What the first year looks like | Time to live | Who maintains it | Talks to your PMS? | Changing a detail |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace) | Roughly $200 to $600 in subscriptions, plus your time, before any booking engine | Days to weeks of your own evenings | You | Through a third-party booking widget | You, in the builder, then anywhere else it appears |
| WordPress plus booking plugin | Templated build around €1,500 to €4,000, plus €15 to €80 a month hosting and maintenance, plus the booking engine | Depends on who assembles it | You, or whoever you pay | Through a plugin somebody has to maintain | Whoever on the team knows WordPress |
| Agency build | €4,000 to €8,000 custom, €8,000 to €25,000+ bespoke; US agencies quote $10,000 to $50,000 | Weeks (one vendor quotes 4 to 6) | The agency, usually billed separately | Through the booking engine integration they scope | A ticket, then a wait |
| Hotel platform | Monthly subscription, sometimes a per-booking commission; few publish a number | Minutes to days, by the vendors' own claims | The platform | Depends on the platform: ask | Depends: ask whether you can do it yourself |
Sources for every figure are in the route-by-route sections below.
Route by route: what the number actually buys
DIY builder: cheap to start, expensive to finish
Squarespace lists four plans at $19 to $99 a month on annual billing, with hosting and SSL included. Wix lists $17 to $159 a month, and Wix's own guide notes that marketplace apps can add $3 to $20+ a month each. Both sell list prices in US dollars here; European prices vary by region.
GuruHotel, which sells a hotel website platform, puts DIY at roughly $200 to $600 a year in subscriptions plus your time, before booking plugins. That last clause is the important one. Neither builder includes a hotel booking engine, so availability lives in someone else's widget.
What falls outside the price: the booking engine, the photography, the copy, the translations, and every evening you spend on it.
WordPress plus a booking plugin: total control, total responsibility
WordPress itself is free. Everything around it is not. RevPARGenius, which builds hotel websites, prices templated builds at €1,500 to €4,000 and hosting and maintenance at €15 to €80 a month.
The real cost is who owns the updates. On WordPress, hosting, security patches and plugin updates are your job. If nobody on the team wants that job, it defaults to whoever built the site, at their hourly rate, or to nobody.
What falls outside the price: the booking engine licence, the plugin that connects it, and the person who keeps both working.
Agency build: the design you asked for, on their timeline
RevPARGenius prices a custom site for an independent hotel at €4,000 to €8,000, including booking engine integration, schema markup and multilingual setup, with fully bespoke builds at €8,000 to €25,000+. GuruHotel's range for agency builds is $3,000 to $20,000+ upfront, plus maintenance. At the top of the market, Hooray, a US hospitality agency, puts custom US hotel websites at $10,000 to $50,000, with build-and-maintain packages from $5,000 a month.
Two things are worth reading closely in any agency quote. First, whether the booking engine integration and the languages are inside the number or listed as extras; RevPARGenius's own guide adds an AI chatbot at €1,500 to €6,000 on top. Second, what a change costs after launch, because that is the line most quotes leave blank.
What falls outside the price: post-launch changes, hosting after year one, and the booking engine licence itself.
Hotel platform: a subscription instead of a project
Hotel-specific platforms bundle the site with hosting and updates and charge monthly, typically as a subscription or on commission. Few publish a number, which makes them hard to compare.
The questions that matter here are different. Does the platform replace your booking engine or sit next to it? Does it charge per booking on top of the subscription? Can you change the site yourself, or are you back to filing tickets with a different vendor?
What falls outside the price: whatever the answers to those three questions turn out to be.
The five costs that are not in the quote
1. Hosting and maintenance, every month, forever
A build fee is paid once. Hosting, security and updates are paid every month for as long as the site exists. RevPARGenius's own range is €15 to €80 a month. Over the five years a hotel website typically stays live, that line can overtake the build fee on the cheaper routes.
2. The booking engine, usually priced on its own
On every route except some hotel platforms, the booking engine is a separate product with a separate bill. A July 2026 price survey by Tribii, which sells a free booking engine and PMS for independent hotels, built from vendors' own published pricing pages, found booking engines for small independents costing anywhere from nothing to roughly €300 a month, with per-booking fees often at 1% to 3%. Hooray adds booking engine setup at $500 to $5,000.
Ask whether "commission-free" means no percentage at all, or no percentage beyond the monthly fee.
3. Multilingual, which is rarely one line
Your travellers do not all read English. Some quotes include languages, others treat each one as extra work, and almost none include the translation itself. Ask three things: is each language a separate site, a plugin or built in; who writes the translations; and who updates all of them when the breakfast time changes.
4. Photography
No build quote includes a photographer, and no template rescues weak photos. If your images are more than a few years old, budget for them separately, because the site will be judged on them before anything else loads.
5. The change you cannot make yourself
This is the one measured in weeks, not euros. Every small edit that needs an agency ticket, a developer or the one colleague who knows the login is an edit that waits, or never happens.
In Clutch's 2025 survey of 406 US small business owners, 61% said they update their website at least once a week. Clutch runs a marketplace for web agencies, so read it with that in mind. At Hotel Harmony, the site went about nine years without a real update. Not because nobody cared, but because the site could only be changed by people who did not work there.
The build fee is what the website costs to make. The change you cannot make yourself is what it costs to own.
What a hotel website needs that a small business website does not
A restaurant or a consultant can run happily on a general builder. A hotel has four requirements those builders were not designed around.
- Live availability. The traveller wants to know whether the room exists on their dates, not read a description of it. That means a connection to the PMS or booking engine that stays current without anyone copying numbers across.
- Structured data. Search engines and AI assistants read rooms, prices, location and amenities as data, not prose. RevPARGenius's guide warns that a client-rendered template search engines cannot index will quietly cost bookings every month. At Hotel Harmony, getting this right showed up in analytics within weeks.
- A booking path that holds up on a phone. Most travellers start on mobile. A checkout that jumps to a different domain, a different design and a smaller font is where direct bookings go to die.
- Changes that land everywhere at once. A new breakfast time or a parking price should not need updating on the site, in the booking engine, in the confirmation email and in the chat separately. Each extra place is a place it will eventually be wrong.
Where AskWhisper sits
We publish our pricing, so here it is.
The AskWhisper Website starts at €99 a month, with the price depending on the size and scope of the property. It is built from a description of your hotel, professionally designed and fully managed, with hosting included. A custom domain is not included. Every page carries an AI assistant, the site is multilingual and optimised for search and AI search, and it reads from the same knowledge base as your guest messages. Your PMS, booking engine and reservations stay where they are.
The website is sold on its own. The AskWhisper Suite, which handles guest messaging, the guest app and upsells, is a separate product at €99 a month with ten rooms included, then €7 per extra room, plus a €399 one-time setup fee.
On timing, our own FAQ says most properties go live within a few days. There is nothing to host, patch or update, and changes are made in plain language. Hotel Harmony's owner asked for a gift voucher page and got one, after nine years of a site nobody on her team could open. The full story is in the Hotel Harmony and Ghent Urbanist case.
When an agency build is genuinely the right call
Sometimes it is, and pretending otherwise would undercut everything above.
When the design is the product. A property whose entire brand lives in a specific visual world, with an art director and a photographer already on retainer, will get more from a bespoke build than from any platform. That is exactly what the €8,000 to €25,000+ band buys.
When there is a real brand budget. If the website is one part of a rebrand that also covers signage, print and interiors, a single agency holding the whole identity can be worth the premium.
When a group runs legacy systems. A multi-property group with a custom CRS, a loyalty programme or in-house integrations may need someone to build around what already exists rather than beside it.
In each of those cases, ask the agency one question before signing: after launch, who on my team can change the site, and how long does it take? If the answer is "nobody, submit a ticket", price that in.
What is your current website costing you in changes that never happen?
If the answer is "about nine years", see how the site builds itself from a description of your hotel. No demo call, no template picking. Or read how Hotel Harmony rebuilt two sites and what changed in the analytics within weeks.
Turn lookers into bookers. Just Ask Whisper.
