Hotel website design: who builds hotel websites, and what to ask before you sign

Hotel websites are built by one of four parties: an independent agency, a hotel-technology vendor that sells the site along with the booking engine, a subscription site builder, or the chain the hotel belongs to. The booking engine is the software on the site that shows rooms and rates and takes the reservation.

We wanted to know who actually does the work. Agency directories list only the firms that say they work for hotels; a website, on the other hand, often carries the credit of whoever built it. On 3 October 2026 we started from a list of 10,046 hotels with a website. They shared 6,786 different sites, because the hotels of a chain sit on the same one. We read 6,440 of them, in 72 countries, and looked for the credit on each.

We found one on 956 sites, or 15%. Adding the traces a visitor never sees, and keeping only the names we could identify as an agency, a vendor or a hotel group, the sites that point to a maker come to 1,320.

Behind those 1,320 sites are 646 names: 530 agencies and freelancers, 100 hotel-technology vendors and 16 groups that build their own.

You can tell who built a hotel’s website from the foot of its home page, or from the page’s code. The commonest credit is a line beside the legal notices: “Website by”, “Realizzazione”, “Konzept, Design & Umsetzung”, with a link to the firm that did the work. The others sit where a visitor does not look.

Take one example. The home page code of a French hotel holds a comment, a note the browser does not display: an acronym, the © sign, an agency’s web address and a version number. The same line appears in the code of 31 hotels, 29 of them in France. It is the software that agency builds its sites with, and it signs every one of them.

In all we collected 1,490 links between a hotel and the firm that built its site, each with the original wording. We checked every one against the saved page, and the wording was there in 1,490 cases out of 1,490.

Checking your own site takes five minutes.

The agencies that build hotel websites are many and small: of the 530 we found, 429 are credited on a single hotel among those we read. They may have built others that carry no credit, or that were not on our list; the shape of the market is clear all the same.

Agencies with three hotels or more number 51. The top 10 account for 227 credits out of 960. It is a local trade: of the 101 agencies with at least two hotels, 75 have them all in one country. And the teams are small. For 49 agencies the LinkedIn page gives a size band: 43 state 50 employees or fewer, and 18 of those no more than 10.

That tells you two things. The agency pitching for your site has, in all likelihood, built few hotel sites: ask which, open them and see how they look today. And when the builder is a team of ten, it matters who will be updating the site in three years: have it written down.

The largest suppliers of hotel websites are the hotel-technology vendors, the companies that sell the booking engine and the site with it. We counted 100 of them. The top 5 account for 179 credits out of 372, nearly half; the top 5 agencies for 177 out of 960, under a fifth.

Their true size shows up in a different clue. Every site loads measurement codes: one for analytics, one for advertising and, often, a container that manages them all, Google Tag Manager. The same code on hotels with different owners means somebody runs them together. We found 180 codes shared by at least two sites. Of the 22 that sit on 10 sites or more, 15 belong to a technology vendor’s platform and 7 to a hotel group. None belongs to an independent agency.

These platforms hardly ever sign their work. Of the 102 sites under the second container, none says who built it, in a credit or in any of the other traces we looked for. Of the 450 sites that sit under the vendors’ codes, 41 do.

If your site is on one of these platforms, the container that decides what gets measured belongs to the vendor, and you share it with dozens of other hotels. Google’s Tag Manager help recommends that the account be managed by someone in your organisation and not by an external agency, with at least two administrators.

The 5,484 unsigned websites tell us little about who built them, because silence has at least three causes. The first is the chains: 247 of the sites we read host more than one hotel on our list, they are brand sites, and only 19 point to a maker. The second is the technology vendors’ platforms, which as we saw do not sign. The third is the agencies that leave no credit, or put it inside an image: nobody can count those from outside.

The code often says what the site is made with.

WordPress is the most widely used website software in the world, and hotels use it about as much as everyone else: 2,685 sites of 6,440, or 42%. W3Techs, which measures it across the whole web, put it on 40.1% of all websites on 8 October 2026. Another 315 sites sit on one of the three subscription site builders we can recognise: you pick a template, fill it in and pay a monthly fee.

A site built with WordPress can pass from one agency to another, because the software carries a free licence and no supplier owns it.

The best website builder for a hotel is the one that leaves four things with the hotel: the domain, the content, the link to the booking engine and the analytics. Any of the four kinds of supplier can get you there; what changes is what you have to ask. For each kind, the table gives what we counted on the sites we read.

No row is better than the others in general, and we did not judge the quality of any site. An independent hotel with one person in marketing and a hotel with thirty sister properties need different things. In all four cases the useful question is the same: what is left in my hands on the day I change supplier?

The domain, the content, the link to bookings and the analytics belong to the hotel only if they are registered in its name or the contract says so. For each there is a place to check.

That leaves the link to bookings. On 2,288 home pages of 6,440 the code names one of the reservation systems we can recognise. The site and the booking engine are two products, even when one supplier sells both: ask whether you can change one without rebuilding the other.

Before you sign, ask for eight things and have them written into the contract. They apply to an agency, a technology vendor and a site builder alike, and to a new site as much as to a redesign.

On the credit, Google is explicit. Its guide to hiring someone for SEO, updated on 5 June 2026, says “You should never have to link to an SEO”, and that no one can guarantee first place on Google. Its spam policies, updated on 28 August 2026, list among the examples of link spam links distributed widely in the footers of various sites, and links required by a contract that does not leave the site’s owner the choice of qualifying them. Qualifying a link means adding the nofollow attribute, which tells Google not to count it.

The same guide gives advice that holds for any supplier: for an initial audit, read access to Search Console is enough. Write access comes later.

The hotel website still matters when guests ask ChatGPT, because it is one of the sources the assistant reads to check the hotel. On 27 September 2026, across 84 hotels, the official site made up 22% of the sources read to check a hotel and booking portals 39%: both are median shares. In our study of 3,288 answers from ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, from August 2026, when an answer named one of the world’s 50 best hotels the hotel’s own site was among the links shown in 24% of cases.

Whoever builds the site decides two things that bear on those numbers. One is whether the assistants’ crawlers can get in: that depends on a file on the site and on the firewall in front of it, and the rules are in our guide on how to get your hotel on ChatGPT and Gemini. The other is whether opening times, prices and distances are written as text or locked inside images and PDFs.

Then the site has to be filled and kept up to date, and no supplier does that alone. We measured how much the best-known hotels publish in our article on how much the best hotels publish, and whether a hotel blog brings traffic; who does the work inside the hotel is the subject of who actually does hotel marketing.

We read the home page of every site and, where there was one, the legal notices: 9,187 saved pages, 866 of them legal. Where a site blocked us or returned an empty page we used a service that opens the page as a browser would; 346 sites could not be read. We looked for the credit in about twenty languages.

Of the 1,540 links we found we kept 1,490: 50 led to general-purpose software or to names that had nothing to do with the site, and 3 more had already been dropped because the wording could not be found on the page. To decide the kind of maker we read the home page of each of the 792 names: 646 remained. We classified 142 by hand and 504 with a program. Among the latter, nearly all credited on a single hotel, a few may be in the wrong category.

Three limits. A credit says who built the site. Whoever runs its marketing today may be someone else: we did not read the dates of the credits, and a site can be five years old. The list is a sample neither of the world’s hotels nor of luxury: it takes in independent hotels, chains and franchised motels, and the agency with most credits, 61, works for motels and budget hotels in the United States. And silence proves nothing: about those who do not sign, we know only what the code lets us see.