Free website builders for hotels —
the real cost nobody tells you

The "free" website builder: what the ads don't show

Website builders like Wix, Squarespace, and Webnode are marketed on their lowest tier — the one with their own ads plastered across your pages, no custom domain, and a URL that reads something like yourhotel.wixsite.com/home. That's not a business website. That's a placeholder.

To get something you'd actually show a guest, you need to upgrade. Here is what a realistic setup costs once you add what a hospitality business actually needs:

That's €150 to €350 per year for a site that still looks like a template — because it is one. Every other hotel using the same builder's "Elegant Accommodation" theme looks like yours.

WordPress: more flexible, but not simpler

WordPress powers roughly 40% of the web, and it's genuinely powerful. It's also genuinely complex. A WordPress site for a hotel needs:

WordPress is not a bad choice — for people who enjoy building websites. For a hotel owner who wants to focus on guests, it is a second part-time job you never applied for.

The cost nobody puts in a table: your time

Neither table above captures the real number. Building a website yourself — whether on Wix, Squarespace, or WordPress — takes:

• Initial build: 20–60 hours to produce something that looks professional and works on mobile. More if you're learning as you go.
• Ongoing maintenance: Updates, photo changes, price adjustments, plugin security patches — 1–3 hours per month, every month.
• When something breaks: And it will break, usually before a bank holiday weekend — add another 3–8 hours hunting for the cause.

If your time is worth €30/hour (conservative for a business owner), the first year of a DIY website costs €600–2,400 in time alone, before you've paid a penny for hosting.

Why hospitality is particularly badly served by template builders

Generic website builders are designed for every kind of business. That means they're optimised for none of them. A hotel or gîte has specific needs that most builders handle badly:

• Room photo carousels that work properly on mobile — not just stacked images
• Tarifs tables that are easy to update without breaking the layout
• Structured data markup so Google shows your rooms, price range, and review score in search results
• Booking CTA that sends guests to your reservation engine with one click — not buried in a sub-menu
• Legal pages (mandatory in France, UK, and Scandinavia) — most builders give you nothing
• Multilingual support — essential if you host international guests

Getting all of this right on a DIY platform usually means buying additional plugins, fighting with mobile layouts for hours, and ultimately producing something that still doesn't look as good as you wanted.

What professional actually costs

A Pixelbee website is €92 per month. That's €1,104 per year. Included: everything above, built specifically for hospitality, maintained for you, mobile-optimised from day one, with legal pages, structured data, and a booking button that actually works.

That last number is the one that matters. If your website generates one direct booking per week that would otherwise have gone through Booking.com at 18% commission, the website pays for itself entirely. Everything beyond that is money you weren't getting before.

The lock-in problem with website builders

There is one more thing to consider: what happens when you want to leave.

With Wix or Squarespace, you cannot export your content in any usable format. Your pages, your photos, your structure — they live inside their system. If you stop paying, the site disappears. If you want to move to a different provider, you start from zero.

With Pixelbee, the contract includes a buyout option after six months (€990 for source files), and at the end of a 24-month term the files are transferred to you free. Your content, your code, in your hands — no lock-in, no ransom.