From a Booking.com listing to a live site: what we need from you

The most common reason an owner puts off getting a direct-booking site is the imagined homework. Write all the room descriptions again. Find the photos. Decide the cancellation policy properly this time. Somewhere in there, the rainy season ends, the rooms fill up, and the whole thing gets pushed to next year.

So we start from the other end. You already have a listing on Booking.com, or Airbnb, or both. That listing has your rooms, your photos, your rates, your house rules and your amenity list, written and rewritten over years of guests asking questions. It is not perfect, but it is a long way from nothing.

That listing is where we begin.

What we take from the listing you already have

Give us the link and we build the first draft from it. Room types and bed configurations. The photographs. The descriptions, cleaned up a little. Your amenities, your location, your check-in and check-out times as they're currently published, your cancellation terms as written.

Within a few days you get a link to a working site on your own domain, with a booking engine on it, and a quiet instruction: look at it the way a guest would.

Most owners find the same two or three things. A room name that made sense years ago and confuses people now. A policy that no longer matches what you actually do. Photos that look fine at listing size and tired at full width.

That is the point of starting from the listing. You are correcting something in front of you rather than inventing something from a blank page, and correcting is much faster.

Nobody writes their best room description on demand. Everybody can tell you what's wrong with one.

The handful of things only you have

Here is the real checklist. It is short, and none of it takes long, but we genuinely cannot proceed without it.

The original photographs. Listing sites compress and crop. A large photo of a sea-view room in San Pedro, with the curtain moving, fills the top of a homepage in a way a thumbnail never will. If you have the originals on a phone, a laptop or an old hard drive, send them. If you don't, this is the moment to spend a morning with someone who owns a decent camera — it is usually the single biggest improvement to a small property's site.

The real check-in rules. Not the published ones. The actual ones. What happens when the bus from Belmopan arrives at nine in the evening. Whether the gate is locked. Who has the key when you're out. Whether early arrivals can leave bags. The AI concierge only answers from facts you've approved, so the answers it gives guests are exactly as good as what you tell us here — and no better.

The domain login. If you own yourname.com already, we need access to point it at the new site. If you've lost the login, we'll help you recover it. If you don't have a domain yet, we register one and it's yours.

Access to your booking-site accounts. This is what lets one calendar stay in sync across Booking.com, Expedia with Hotels.com, Airbnb, Vrbo and Google — those five are included on every plan. Without it, you're back to updating availability by hand in several places, which is where double bookings come from.

A staff list. Names, roles, and who should see what. Staff logins carry page-level view, edit and delete permissions, so your housekeeper sees room status and nothing else, and your manager sees rates. Everyone gets a guided tour the first time they log in.

Your deposit decision. Direct bookings are paid at the property. If you'd rather take a deposit, that runs through your own Stripe account and the money goes straight to you — we never hold it. Some lodges in Cayo take a deposit on longer stays and nothing on one-nighters. Either way is fine; we just need to know.

The review, and then going live

Once the corrections are in, there's a proper review. We sit with you, or on a call, and go through the site page by page — the booking flow, the rate you'd actually charge a walk-in, the concierge's answers to the dozen questions guests ask most.

This is where owners catch things nobody else would. A guesthouse in Hopkins spotted that we'd described their airport transfer as included when it's included only from Dangriga. A small hotel in Punta Gorda realised their own listing had said "free parking" for years when the lot belongs to the neighbour.

Then we go live. The domain points at the new site, which takes a day or so to settle across the internet. We put a test booking through end to end and watch it land on the calendar and block the same dates on the booking sites. Staff log in, take the tour, and ask their questions while someone is still there to answer them.

From first link to live site, setup is typically done within a couple of weeks. It is rarely our side that sets the pace — it's usually waiting on photographs or a forgotten domain password, which is why the list above is worth doing first.

What it costs, and what you keep

Plans are billed monthly: Starter is BZ$119 a month for one to six rooms, Growth is BZ$279 for seven to fourteen, Pro is BZ$479 for fifteen to twenty-five. Annual billing includes a month free and waives setup; monthly billing carries a one-time BZ$499 setup fee. Extra channels beyond the five included are BZ$29 a month each.

Bookings through your own website and booking engine carry 0% commission, on every plan.

The listing sites keep doing their job — they bring you guests who had never heard of you, and they earn their commission on those. What changes is the repeat guest from Corozal, the family who found you through a friend, the couple who read about Caye Caulker and typed your name into Google. Those bookings now have somewhere to land that belongs to you.

The site, the domain and the data are yours. There's no long-term contract.

If you want to start, send us your listing link and we'll build the first draft from it. Get in touch and we'll take it from there.