Custom Hospitable websites, built on the booking flow you already use

Two ways to get a Hospitable website

Hospitable calls its direct booking feature Direct. Its help center describes two ways to use it.

The first is a Hospitable direct booking site that Hospitable hosts for you. You build it inside your account with its site builder, and it can sit on your own domain. It is the quick route, and for many hosts it is enough.

The second is a self-hosted site. You keep your own website and embed Hospitable’s booking widgets in it. Hospitable’s help center puts the split plainly: you control the design, the structure, the content and the hosting, and Hospitable handles availability, pricing, the booking flow and payments.

A custom build is the second route. The Hospitable website guests see is yours, and the booking engine inside it is still Hospitable’s.

What Hospitable Direct charges

A Hospitable direct booking carries a fee, and the size depends on which version of Direct you use. These figures are from Hospitable’s help center and pricing pages on November 10, 2026.

Version	Fee	Who processes the payment	What comes with it
Direct Basic	1% host fee. Stripe’s processing fees are separate	Your own Stripe account	The site builder and widgets. Chargebacks are yours to handle
Direct Premium	4% from the guest and 3% from the host, or 7% from the host alone	Hospitable, as merchant of record	Guest vetting, chargeback protection and $5M damage protection

Hospitable Direct Premium is listed for properties in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. Both versions include the booking widget and a listing on Google Vacation Rentals for eligible properties. The guide to Google Vacation Rentals partners explains how that listing works.

Direct is part of the Professional and Mogul plans, so a Hospitable direct booking website of either kind starts there. Hospitable lists Professional at $59 a month with two properties included, and Mogul at $99 a month with three. The Host plan and the free Essentials plan do not include it.

What that means on one booking

Take a $1,000 booking as a simple example. Each company applies its fee to a slightly different base, so treat these as round figures.

Where the guest books	What comes out of $1,000	What you keep
Your site, on Direct Basic	$10 to Hospitable, plus about $29.30 to Stripe at 2.9% and 30 cents	About $960.70
Your site, on Direct Premium, host-only	$70 to Hospitable, payment processing included	$930
A listing on Airbnb, on the 15.5% single fee	$155	$845

The gap is why hosts build a direct channel. To run the numbers at your own rate, use the Host Fee Calculator.

Where the hosted site stops

The site Hospitable hosts is made to take a booking. In my view it does that well for a guest who already has your link.

Being found by a guest who has never heard of you is a different job. It takes pages built around what people search for in your area, a structure you can shape and content that goes beyond the listing. That is where a custom site earns its cost.

The guide on how to get more direct bookings covers where those guests come from.

What I build on top of Hospitable

Every site is custom. For a Hospitable account, the build looks like this.

• A design made for your properties, on your own domain.
• A page for each property with its own Hospitable booking widget. Hospitable’s setup guide asks for one page and one widget per property.
• A search widget on the homepage for portfolios, so guests can check dates across your properties.
• Area and guide pages written around local searches, which the widget alone cannot give you.
• Owner pages, if you offer co-hosting or manage for others.
• Titles, headings, structured data and analytics done properly from the first page.

The second site I have built runs on Hospitable. It is for an operator with nine cabins who also sells co-hosting, and it is close to launch.

What stays in Hospitable

Nothing about how you run bookings has to change. Your calendar, rates, messages and reservations stay in Hospitable.

Its help center says the Direct calendar stays in sync with your Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com calendars. A booking on your site closes those dates on the platforms, and a platform booking closes them on your site.

Your listings stay live. Nothing on the site is set up to move a platform guest across, and the guide to the off-platform policy explains why that matters.

What you need before we start

• A Hospitable plan that includes Direct, which today means Professional or Mogul.
• Direct switched on, as Basic or Premium, with payouts set up.
• Your domain, or the name you want to register.
• Photos and the facts about each property.

If you are not on Hospitable yet, or you are weighing it against another system, the booking software integrations page lists the others I work with. The comparisons of OwnerRez vs Hospitable and Lodgify vs Hospitable set them side by side.

A custom Hospitable website costs from $2,000 for the site, with full SEO from $1,500 as a one-time total. Hospitable’s subscription and Direct fees are separate and go to Hospitable. See vacation rental website design for what the build includes.