So if you are a hotel or property owner looking how to create a hotel booking website, we’re going to tell you how to do that using our BNBForms platform.
BNBForms is a vacation rental software that allows you to create professional accommodation listings, show availability calendars in real time, connect to global online travel agents, and enable guests to book those accommodations online on your website.
If you published your property listings on different OTAs, this also shouldn’t be a stop sign in creating your own hotel booking website and accepting direct reservations. BNBForms will manage that too.
It’s worth mentioning it won’t take much of the learning curve or even money; BNBForms doesn’t charge you or your guest any extra commissions, the only subscription cost is $119 per year, no matter how many accommodations / clients / bookings you need to manage.
Signing up for BNBForms, free to use for one month, no credit card details asked, you get access to your personal account right away. This will help you at least test the waters and see whether the platform meets your needs perfectly.
Note: although his tutorial is for everyone, it’s going to be most sufficient for those property owners who already have a website on any CMS and are looking for integrating booking options.
So let’s first help you define your starting point.
Scenario #1. You already have a website powered by WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, Joomla, or any other platform, you are good to go with BNBForms!
Scenario #2. You don’t have a website yet. In this case, in order to get all the benefits of BNBForms, you must firstly start a website on any preferable platform, on any terms.
Every CMS/website building platform provides a detailed guide on how to get started. Some platforms even provide free trial options so that you can start when you want.
We also have many tutorials of how exactly you can bridge BNBForms with your site depending on the CMS you use:
- Wix Booking
- Squarespace Booking
- WordPress Booking
- GoDaddy
- Weebly Booking
- Joomla Booking
- Plain HTML website
- PromoteMyPlace
Connecting BNBForms to your website takes a single code embed and a few configuration clicks depending on your CMS requirements.
So once you have established your website with any design on any platform, you can proceed to this BNBForms tutorial of how to create a hotel booking website!
Time for the blow-by-blow guide on how to create hotel booking website.
Step 1. Create an account for property management with BNBForms
Follow the next step to start your free account:
- Sign up with BNBForms.
- Confirm your email address via email.
- Log in to BNBForms with the received login details.
- You are all set up!
In your account, many essential system pages are pre-installed and the sample content (e.g. accommodation types) is added in order to speed up the property listing creation process.
You can either edit the current sample content or delete it and add your own.
Step 2. Add rental units
Although you can go about the settings in any preferable way, adding rental units is a step you can’t skip.
Those can be hotel rooms, holiday homes, bread and breakfast units, boats, trailers, campsites, and more.
Any unit you can rent out for at least 1 night.
At this step, you can add significant information about each property – it’ll be perfectly structured on the site so that guests can quickly see details.
- Text description
- Property photos
- Сategory / type (king, economy, double, single, etc.)
- Amenities (air conditioning, towels)
- Bed types
- Capacity
- List extras available for additional purchase (child care, food basket, massage, lockers, etc.)
- Add custom fields to specify more details you wish to add about the property.
All these details can be extended in the booking widget for each property.
Step 3. Add prices, rates and seasons
To set up differences in prices, use the “Seasons” menu (e.g. weekend, summer, Christmas, etc.).
Seasons are related to the the ‘’Rates” menu, where you can further customize price variables for each property based on:
- Seasonal period
- Extra amenities, e.g. breakfast
- The number of guests
- The length of stay.
The rates and pricing system is agile; it allows you to set regular base rates and dynamic discounts which may be optionally applied to the search results.
Step 4. Include taxes and fees into the property cost
The final charge will be calculated based on the regular property cost, plus optional tax and extra fee charges you might need to include and inform about.
The BNBForms system lets you decide whether information about extra charges must be specified next to the property price or the latter should be already displayed as it is.
Also, these charges will be clarified at checkout in the price breakdown table.
Step 5. Enable online bookings via payments
So how to create a hotel booking website with the online payment options? With BNBForms, you can simply enable the needed gateways in the admins dashboard via Accommodation > Settings > Payment Gateways.
Here you can choose between Test Payment, Pay on Arrival, Direct Bank Transfer, PayPal, 2Checkout, Stripe, Braintree, and Beanstream/Bambora.
Enabling a test payment allows you to test how the payments are processed on your site.
No need for any extra extension or coding, it’s a matter of a few button clicks. For each payment gateway you enable, there are extra settings as to whether you want to charge the full amount or deposit, among others.
As for the booking confirmation modes, you can choose a more or less automatic way to confirm bookings you receive via the booking widget:
- Approve every reservation by hand.
- Guests can confirm their reservation requests by email.
- Automatic confirmation by payment (full or deposit, fixed or percentage).
The system of automated email messaging is also there – you are free to customize email templates or use default ones, the colors and branding are also easy to update.
You’ll find it easy to brand email templates as to the overall color scheme, email subject, text content and other details.
You’ll have loads of tools to automate communication with your staff and guests.
Step 6. Connect a channel manager
A unified system of BNBForms combines communications from multiple channels known as OTAs, online travel agents, such as Booking.com or Airbnb.
The built-in channel manager will cross-sync bookings after just one setup, you won’t need to always toggle between different accounts in order to keep an eye on the property availability.
The iCal sync technology you’ll use ensures a near-real time sync across channels and your website.
Since this format is also supported by the Google and Apple calendar applications, you can connect them as well to get booking notifications right to your favorite apps.
It’s okay to alter the frequency of the sync process, you can set it up to at least 15 minutes.
Step 7. Set up extra options as for the search form, booking rules, etc.
Setting up the booking rules, you are free to designate default available arrival and departure, minimum and maximum stay-in days and disable booking completely for selected rooms for a certain time frame.
So, how to create an online hotel booking website with a booking widget? You can create a custom one using the standard search property form you see in the booking widget or it can be fully edited in a few ways:
- Change the age of children
- Leave out all the fields except for arrival and departure if you operate a single accommodation
- Optionally remove the “Children” field
- Replace ‘Adults’ with the “Guests” field labels
- Add custom filters to the search form, e.g. room type or location – you can add as many fields with the needed parameters as required.
Step 8. Manage bookings on the backend
When you receive bookings, there are various menu sections where you can manage them:
- View and search bookings in a calendar mode (filter bookings by statuses, view client details, and more).
- See the payment history of every booking, transaction ID, the amount paid and to be paid (if any).
- Record new bookings via the system by hand.
To view how your business is performing at the particular moment, you can go to the Reports menu, pick dates and see your earnings in total for accommodations, services, etc.
This is going to be really insightful! As for managing data, you can also download reports in portable CSV formats and save them on any device. how to create online hotel booking website
Step 9. Add a booking widget to your site
After all these settings are applied, you can create an online booking form by simply generating a code and pasting it to your website.
You’ll find a guide for every platform in the BNBForms dashboard. All you need to do is to copy and paste this code to the needed website section.
This will add a mobile-friendly booking widget to your site with the Book button.
To find the best fit for your site, the colors of the widget can be fully altered! We recommend using such color tools as Canva to select complementary colors.
It’s rare for travelers to book a short-term rental property in a way other than online in this time and date, so you’ll definitely will do them a favor.
Conclusion: How to create a hotel booking website with BNBForms?
If you are a property manager looking after more than one cabin, cottage or holiday let, you can build and centralize management of all our properties in one BNBForms dashboard, no matter the content management system you choose for your site.
Alongside the booking engine and channel manager functionality, the BNBForms service allows you to process online payments, manage bookings and earnings and provide your guests with the convenient booking options.
The widget allows for multiple accommodation booking at a time so that your customers can reserve rooms for other people within one invoice.
Thus, you can move the vast majority of guest interactions into the cloud and make the system do the biggest part of the job for you. What’s important, BNBForms will cost you nothing to try.
Cost: one fixed yearly subscription price ($119 per year)
Free trial: one month free
Commissions: no per-property or per-booking commission for you or your guest
CMS requirements: add a booking widget to any CMS
Live demo: BNBForms demo
Register for free: Sign up
