What must a small-hotel website have to take bookings?

A guest who lands on your website has already chosen you over hundreds of other places. The website’s only job is not to lose them. We wanted to know how often small properties’ websites do lose them, so we checked.

What did we check?

We took the 360 independent properties from our AI crawler test: hotels, guesthouses and hostels listed on OpenStreetMap in Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Thailand and Mexico. 239 of their websites loaded and were real property sites. The rest no longer existed, did not answer, or showed a parked or for-sale page.

On each home page we looked for five essentials, reading the page the way search engines and AI crawlers do, without running its scripts.

How many hotel websites have the five essentials?

Most have some. Few have all five.

Can a guest book from your home page?

On up to 23% of the websites, no. We found no booking engine, no “book” or “check availability” button, and no date form on the home page. On 16%, there was no tap-to-call, WhatsApp or email link either, so the guest had to copy a number or an address by hand.

Our test reads the code of the page, so it can miss a button built in an unusual way. When we checked a sample of these sites by hand, one in six had a booking button we had missed. Treat 23% as the upper end.

Only 21% of the websites showed a booking engine we could recognise. SiteMinder was the most common, followed by booking plugins for WordPress. The rest took bookings by form, email or phone, or sent guests to a booking site.

Does your website work on a phone?

On 86% of the websites, yes. That leaves one in seven that is not set up to fit a phone screen. Google says it uses the mobile version of a site, crawled as a smartphone, for indexing and ranking. A site that only works on a computer is judged on its worst version.

Can a guest reach you in one tap?

Half the websites had a link that calls the property when tapped, 47% had an email link, and only 10% had a WhatsApp link. A third had none of the three.

A phone number written as plain text still works, but the guest has to copy it. On a phone, every extra step loses people.

Can Google and AI assistants read your details?

Mostly not. Only 16% of the websites described themselves to search engines as a hotel, guesthouse or hostel, using the shared format called structured data. Google recommends that local businesses do this, with at least a name and address, and suggests a phone number, map position and price range.

Another 6% had fewer than 50 words of readable text on the home page. Everything else only appears once the page’s scripts run, which many AI crawlers do not do.

What else helps guests decide?

Three smaller things came up less often than we expected:

• A price on the home page: 17% showed one. A “from” price answers the first question most guests have.
• A map link: 38% linked to a map.
• Other languages: 39% told search engines they had versions in other languages.

What should you do this week?

1. Open your website on your phone and try to book a room. Time it. If it takes more than a minute, or you cannot find how, fix that first.
2. Make your phone number and WhatsApp tappable, at the top of the page.
3. Ask whoever built your site whether it has structured data for a hotel, guesthouse or hostel. If not, it is a small job.
4. Check that your website link on Google Maps, OpenStreetMap and your booking-site profiles opens your real site, not an old address.