Hospitality, Direct Bookings, Web Design
Hotel websites in Zanzibar and Tanzania: what a direct-booking site needs
What a hotel, lodge or resort website in Zanzibar and Tanzania needs to win direct bookings back from Booking.com and Airbnb, from live rates to named rooms.
, 4 min read
Every booking that arrives through Booking.com or Airbnb costs you a commission, and many hotel websites in Zanzibar give a guest little reason to book anywhere else. A direct-booking site has to match what the platforms do well, showing each room with its price for the guest's dates, and then make the request easy.
The examples below come from our gallery. Each is a concept site we designed for an invented hotel or camp, so the properties and their rates are made up. The ideas are what count.
Price the stay for the guest's own dates
A "from $190" price is a starting point. The number a guest compares against Booking.com is the total for their dates and their party.
Shwari Bay is a fourteen-room beach resort on the north coast, between Nungwi and Kendwa. The first thing on the page is a planner: check-in, check-out, adults, children, room type, and bed and breakfast or half board. The total updates as you change anything, so five nights in an Ocean Suite reads as one clear figure with the nightly rate under it. "Request these dates" sends it to the reservations team, who confirm by email within a day. Nothing is charged until the guest confirms.
The rules that change a price sit right under the rooms: breakfast included, a seventh night free, a peak-season supplement on named dates and children under four free.
Show every fee that changes the total
Safari lodges carry park and concession fees set by the government, and guests notice when they appear late. Mawio Camp, a nine-tent camp in the Serengeti, puts a rate bar across the hero. Choose dates, adults, children and a tent, and it shows the price per night and the total, with the park fees on the same line, passed on at cost.
Further down, a rates table sets out green and high season prices for each tent, the single supplement, the half rate for children aged six to fifteen and the two-night minimum stay. Two short lists say what is included and what is not. A guest can work out the full cost of a stay without writing in.
Sell rooms by name
Booking platforms flatten rooms into "Double room, sea view". Your own site can describe the actual room. Chokaa House is a boutique hotel in Stone Town with nine rooms in four named kinds. The Chumvi rooms face the inner courtyard. The Mnara rooms have an iron balcony level with the minaret next door. The Bahari rooms look west over the channel, and the Baraza Suite takes the top front of the house with a private stair to the roof.
Each has its size, view, bed and sleeping arrangement, its own nightly rate and its own peak rate. The booking form lists the rooms by name, so a guest who fell for the balcony over the lane can ask for exactly that.
Give guests a reason to book direct
The concepts add things a platform listing cannot:
- a hold on the room while the guest decides, two days at Chokaa and 48 hours at Mawio
- airport or ferry transfers added in the same request
- clear arrival notes, such as Chokaa's porter carrying bags down the last 150 metres of a lane too narrow for cars
- a real person at the property who replies within a day
Work out what the commission costs you
Before you spend on a new site, put your own numbers into our free OTA calculator. It shows what you pay the platforms each year and what winning some of those guests back would be worth. We covered the wider maths in winning direct bookings back from the OTAs.
The platforms still bring guests who would never have found you; the aim is to win back the ones who search for you by name.
What a direct-booking hotel website costs
Live rates and a booking request form make this a Big website: $350, paid once when the work is done, with no deposit and no page limit. A hotel that only needs its rooms, photos, a map and an enquiry form can start with a Small website at $300. Either one goes live two weeks after your content arrives, with a dedicated manager who looks after it from then on.
In a $350 build the live price sends a reservation request, which your team confirms. A real booking engine with live availability and online payment is quoted separately. More on the web design page.
Pick the hotel concept in our gallery that feels closest to your property, then book a call or message us on WhatsApp to talk it through.