Busy Lobby
Free download · 9 pages · Updated quarterly

The real numbers behind an independent inn website.

What it costs — yours and theirs. What OTAs actually take. What "website included" means when you cancel. Nine pages of the questions vendors won't answer, written for someone reading straight through rather than searching.

1,400innkeeper reviews &
forum posts read
25vendors' published
prices verified
3places we argue
against ourselves

Send it to me.

Enter your email and we'll send the PDF and add you to the quarterly update list. Never a pitch email; unsubscribe in one click.

We'll email you when prices change, roughly quarterly, and never for any other reason. You can also download it without signing up — same file.

What's inside

  1. Cover
  2. Where the answers came from · OTA commission math
  3. What it costs — the full competitive pricing table
  4. Will it work — direct booking case, commission by property size
  5. Your reservation system's free website · what happens if you cancel
  6. Squarespace, Wix, and building it yourself
  7. Ownership · why you're not showing on Google
  8. When not to hire us · the ten-minute vendor check
  9. The offer, and three commitments on every demo

Why this exists, and why it's the shape it is

The category has almost no honest content. Two of the largest inn web companies have pricing pages with no prices on them. Every existing article on the subject is written by someone selling a booking engine. When an innkeeper asks whether a new website is worth it, there is nothing to consult — vendor blogs and guessing.

So we went and read the corpus: 1,400 verbatim reviews and forum posts, written when nobody was being sold to. This PDF is what we found, distilled for the innkeeper who is smart, busy, skeptical, and has been pitched too many times before.

"I get scam offers all the time from OTA's to POS systems to pretend guests. It's frustrating and makes you very skeptical about any offers... My rule of thumb is that if I can't absolutely verify a company then I don't participate."
— Innkeeper, B&B owners' forum, October 2023

The corpus was unambiguous that this audience treats vendors as a threat category before a service category. So the PDF opens with provenance, not a pitch. Every competitor price is published and attributed. Page 8 gives away the filter for evaluating vendors, explicitly including us. That's the point.

Send it to me.

Enter your email and we'll send the PDF and add you to the quarterly update list.

Prefer not to give us your email? Download the PDF directly.