How Much Does a Hotel Website Cost in the UK? Build, Running Costs and the OTA Maths
A hotel website in the UK costs from about £1,000 to £2,500 for a template build, £4,000 to £8,000 for a custom site for a typical independent hotel, £8,000 to £15,000 with proper booking engine and PMS integration, and £15,000 to £30,000 or more for a luxury or multi-property site, according to the bands Logic Leap published in July 2026. The build is only part of the bill. Over three years, hosting, photography and booking technology can add almost as much again, and the fairest way to judge any quote is against the commission you already pay online travel agents.
We are The Code Bottega, a web studio in London that builds bespoke websites and booking flows for hospitality and luxury brands. This guide uses other people's published prices, linked and dated, because no two hotels need the same site and we only quote after a conversation.
The short version
- UK providers publish hotel website prices from £400 for a small B&B site (Podium Design, checked 11 November 2026) to £15,000 to £30,000 and beyond for luxury or multi-property sites (Logic Leap, July 2026).
- For a typical independent hotel wanting a custom design, two UK studios publish bands of £4,000 to £8,000 (Logic Leap, July 2026) and £3,000 to £8,000 on WordPress (Webb Marketing, checked 11 November 2026).
- Connecting the site properly to your booking engine and PMS is the biggest single variable: Logic Leap puts it at an extra £2,000 to £6,000 (July 2026).
- In our worked example, a £6,000 custom build is only 52% of a £11,517 three-year bill once hosting, photography and booking add-ons are counted (Logic Leap, July 2026; freetobook, checked 11 November 2026).
- Booking.com publishes no single commission rate: it depends on your country, property type and agreement, and its visibility programmes add a percentage on top (Booking.com partner help, checked 11 November 2026).
- A small property with simple rates rarely needs a custom build. A hotel whose brand is why guests pay more usually does.
How much does a hotel website cost in the UK?
A hotel website in the UK costs anything from a few hundred pounds (Podium Design, checked 11 November 2026) to more than £30,000 (Logic Leap, July 2026), and the price follows one thing more than any other: how deeply the site is tied into the way you sell rooms. A five-page site with a "Book now" button that opens your booking engine in a new tab is one job. A site where availability, rates, packages and upsells appear inside your own pages, in your own design, is a very different one.
Logic Leap, an Oxfordshire studio, publishes the clearest UK bands we found. They are a studio's own published prices, so read them as one market view, not an industry survey.
| Tier | Upfront build |
|---|---|
| Template or site builder | £1,000 to £2,500, plus £30 to £150 a month |
| Custom design and build | £4,000 to £8,000 |
| Custom with booking engine and PMS integration | £8,000 to £15,000 |
| Luxury or multi-property, multilingual | £15,000 to £30,000 and beyond |
Other UK studios publish numbers in the same territory. We read each page on 11 November 2026:
| Who | What they publish | Type of page |
|---|---|---|
| Podium Design | From £400 for a small B&B site; from £1,500 with booking engine integration | Freelancer, Brighton |
| Webgenix | From £1,800 with room galleries, availability calendar and booking engine integration | Studio, fixed price |
| Healy Web Design | £2,000 to £10,000 | Studio guide |
| Webb Marketing | Most hotel sites £3,000 to £8,000 on WordPress | Hotel marketing agency |
| Logic Leap | £4,000 to £8,000 custom; up to £30,000 and beyond | Studio guide, July 2026 |
| Project Cost Estimator | UK freelancer £2,750 to £11,050; UK agency £6,450 to £25,750 | A model scaled from US data, not UK quotes |
Most of what ranks for this search is American and priced in dollars, so be wary of converting a US figure and treating it as a UK budget. Check, too, whether any UK quote you receive includes VAT.
The four tiers, and what each one buys
The four tiers differ in who owns the booking journey: the template, the booking engine, or you. Here is what you get and what you give up at each.
Tier 1: a template or site builder
A template build is a ready-made theme on Wix, Squarespace, WordPress or a hospitality builder, filled with your words and photographs, with a "Book now" button that hands guests to your booking engine. Logic Leap prices it at £1,000 to £2,500 upfront plus £30 to £150 a month (July 2026).
- You get: a decent site quickly, low risk, easy edits.
- You give up: control of the booking hand-off, a design competitors may share, and speed you cannot really tune.
- Right for: small B&Bs, guest houses and inns where the rooms, not the brand, do the selling.
Tier 2: a custom site with a third-party booking engine
A custom site is designed around your property, your photography and your guests, while a third-party booking engine (freetobook, SiteMinder, Mews, Cloudbeds and others) still takes the payment. This is the £4,000 to £8,000 band for a typical independent (Logic Leap, July 2026).
- You get: a site that looks and reads like your hotel, owned code, proper SEO and speed.
- You give up: the last few screens. Guests still finish on the engine's pages, styled as far as that engine allows.
- Right for: most boutique and independent hotels. It is where we would start most conversations.
Tier 3: a custom site with deep booking and PMS integration
A deeply integrated site pulls availability and rates from your engine or PMS through its API and shows them on your own pages, so searching dates, comparing rooms and adding a package all happen in your design. Logic Leap puts this at £8,000 to £15,000 (July 2026).
- You get: a booking journey that feels like one hotel from first page to payment, plus measurement that survives the hand-off.
- You give up: simplicity. You now depend on the engine's API, its documentation and the developer who knows it.
- Right for: hotels with packages, spa or dining add-ons, or a meaningful share of revenue already coming direct.
Tier 4: a custom booking flow
A custom booking flow is a web application built for your rules: several properties, villas and suites sold differently, multilingual checkout, gift vouchers, wedding enquiries, owner logins. Logic Leap prices luxury or multi-property multilingual sites at £15,000 to £30,000 and beyond (July 2026); a fully custom booking flow sits at or above that band.
- You get: exactly the journey your guests need, and no ceiling.
- You give up: budget, and the comfort of a vendor maintaining it. Someone has to own it after launch.
- Right for: luxury groups, multi-property brands and hotels whose way of selling no booking engine supports.
What makes a hotel website cost more?
Six things move a hotel website quote more than page count, and Logic Leap prices most of them (July 2026):
- Booking engine and PMS integration: an extra £2,000 to £6,000, depending on the systems and how well their connections are documented (Logic Leap, July 2026). When a lower published price includes "booking engine integration", ask whether that means a link or embedded widget, or availability and rates shown on your own pages.
- Photography: £800 to £2,500 for a fifteen-room property with a hospitality photographer (Logic Leap, July 2026).
- Copywriting: £500 to £2,000 for room descriptions, area guides and landing pages (Logic Leap, July 2026).
- Each extra language: typically 15 to 25% more on design and build (Logic Leap, July 2026).
- Other integrations: spa, restaurant, gift vouchers, wedding enquiries, reviews. Logic Leap's view is that each is modest but together they can double a build (July 2026).
- Performance and accessibility work: image pipelines, Core Web Vitals, structured data, accessibility checks. Cheap quotes leave them out without saying so.
From the builder's side, the first item is where the money and the bookings are. The moment a guest presses "Check availability" is where a beautiful site often drops them into a slow, off-brand engine page. We wrote about that moment, and why story sells a luxury stay, in luxury hotel web design. If your budget is tight, spend it on the hand-off and the photography before anything decorative.
The running costs nobody puts in the quote
A hotel website's running costs are hosting and maintenance, the booking technology around it, and the content you keep adding. They are rarely in the headline figure.
- Hosting and maintenance: £50 to £200 a month, depending on platform and support (Logic Leap, July 2026).
- Booking engine and add-ons: prices vary from free to quote-only. freetobook, a Glasgow company, publishes its booking engine as free with no commission, then charges £139 a year for card payments, £89 a year for guest messaging and £59 a year for Google bookings, with Google's commission-based ads costing 7% of booking value (checked 11 November 2026).
- Channel manager: freetobook charges £1.50 per OTA booking, at least £9 and at most £99 a month, plus a one-off £49 per channel connected; direct bookings are free (freetobook pricing, checked 11 November 2026). You pay this whether or not you rebuild the website.
- Quote-only platforms: Mews shows no prices on its pricing page and asks for property details first (checked 11 November 2026). Budget for a sales call before you can budget at all.
- Platform licences: Webb Marketing says it has seen hotels paying £300 to £500 a month in platform licence fees on top of a retainer (Webb Marketing, checked 11 November 2026). That is their observation. Either way, ask any provider what happens to your site if you stop paying.
What does a hotel website cost over three years?
Over three years, a custom hotel website with a free third-party booking engine costs roughly twice its build price in our worked example. We used the middle of Logic Leap's custom band for the build, £100 a month for hosting and maintenance (within the £50 to £200 range) and a £1,500 photography shoot (within £800 to £2,500) (Logic Leap, July 2026) and freetobook's card payments add-on (freetobook, checked 11 November 2026). The channel manager is left out because you pay it with or without a new site.
| Item | Basis | Three years | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Custom design and build | Middle of £4,000 to £8,000 | £6,000 | 52% |
| Hosting and maintenance | £100 a month for 36 months | £3,600 | 31% |
| Professional photography | Once, within £800 to £2,500 | £1,500 | 13% |
| Booking engine card payments | £139 a year for 3 years | £417 | 4% |
| Total | £11,517 | 100% |
Your own numbers will differ, but on these published prices a quote that only covers launch day describes about half of what you will spend.
Is a hotel website worth it? The commission maths
A hotel website pays for itself when the bookings it moves from online travel agents to direct save more than it costs. To run the sum you need your real commission rate, and Booking.com does not publish one. Its partner help page says the percentage depends on your country, property type and the agreement you signed; that Preferred Partner and Visibility Booster add a percentage on top; and that in most countries commission is also charged on VAT (Booking.com partner help, checked 11 November 2026). Your rate is in your extranet, under reservation statements.
Here is the sum with illustrative numbers. Replace them with yours.
- Average booking: £300 (two nights at £150).
- Commission: 15% (an example rate, not a published one; use the rate on your statements, as Booking.com's partner help advises).
- Commission per OTA booking: £45.
- Three-year website cost from the example above: £11,517.
- Break-even: £11,517 divided by £45 is 256 bookings over three years, about 7 a month.
Two honest caveats. A direct booking is not free: you still pay card fees and whatever your booking engine charges. And not every direct booking is one you won from an OTA; some guests would have booked direct anyway. Count only the shift you can reasonably expect, and watch your channel mix after launch. If the sum only works on heroic assumptions, the cheaper tier is the right answer.
When you do not need a custom hotel website
You do not need a custom hotel website if your rooms sell themselves on price and location, your rates are simple and you have under a dozen keys. A clean template with a free booking engine and good photographs will serve you well, and we would tell you so.
A custom build also makes no sense before the basics are in place:
- No proper photographs yet? Book the shoot first. Logic Leap's view, which we share, is that a cheaper site with beautiful photos beats an expensive one with dull ones (July 2026).
- Not sure which booking engine you will use? Choose it first. The engine shapes the site, not the other way round.
- Current site only slow or dated? A redesign may be enough. Our guide on when it is time for a new website helps you tell the difference.
Custom earns its cost when the brand is the reason guests pay more, when you sell packages and experiences, when you run more than one property, or when your guests book in two or three languages.
Which tier fits your hotel?
Three questions settle most cases: how simple your rooms and rates are, whether packages or several properties must live inside the booking journey, and whether your booking engine's API can carry that journey on your own pages.
- Small property, simple rates, and the brand is not the reason guests pay more? Yes: tier 1, a template or your booking system's builder. No: go to question 2.
- Must packages, upsells, several properties or languages live inside the booking journey? No: tier 2, a custom site plus a third-party engine. Yes: go to question 3.
- Can your booking engine's API carry that journey on your own pages? Yes: tier 3, deep engine and PMS integration. No: tier 4, a custom booking flow, and a serious brief.
How to compare hotel website quotes
Compare hotel website quotes line by line, not by the total. Ask every provider the same eight questions:
- What exactly happens between "Check availability" and a confirmed booking, on a phone, with my booking engine?
- Which booking engines and PMS have you connected before, and can I click through a live example?
- Who owns the domain, the code, the design and the analytics account at the end?
- Is the price with or without VAT?
- What does the monthly fee include, and what is charged by the hour?
- Do you take any per-booking fee or commission yourselves?
- Are copywriting, photography direction and each extra language in the price?
- How will you measure direct bookings after launch, across the hand-off to the engine?
A good provider answers all eight without hesitation. For the wider picture beyond hotels, our guide to what website design costs in the UK covers builders, freelancers and agencies.
A practical next step
Before you ask anyone for a price, write down three things: your booking engine, channel manager and PMS; your average booking value and commission rate; and your rough split between direct and OTA bookings. With those on one page, a good provider can tell you which tier you need within one conversation.
If your hotel sits in tier 2 or above, that is the work we do: bespoke sites and custom booking and enquiry flows, on custom code, Next.js or WordPress, with speed and SEO built in and the code yours outright. Tell us about your property and we will send back an itemised quote after a short call.
