If you are looking to start a hotel or vacation rental WordPress website with Astra, this is the right tutorial.
The bad news is that small hotels and single rental properties like B&Bs or villas are disadvantaged. Unfortunately, the hospitality sector dominated by big brands and OTAs (online travel agents) leaves almost no room for competition.
In the face of COVID-19 pandemic, many small hotels have fallen short of their plans; some, worse yet, had no chance of survival.
Because of that, rental owners have several crucial tasks on the table so far: how to cut down expenses, how to attract a potential guest online, and how to diversify booking channels.
The good news is that WordPress paired up with a few quality tools can help you solve these issues. In this post, you’re about to see to what extent!
Why Astra?
Is it a good idea to use Astra for hotel or vacation rental niche businesses? No doubt. And we can give you a few good reasons why it can become your go-to solution!
The Astra theme is trusted by more than a million WordPress users, which is a massive deal for a multipurpose WordPress theme. This makes it a perfect starting point in terms of design and speed for literally any sort of website. Beyond that:
- The theme ships with 270+ sleek and flexible starter templates giving you a chance to choose any concept and design you set your mind to. The library includes dedicated Hotel and Bed and Breakfast templates.
- You can customize the theme with any preferable WordPress page builder – Astra offers you tailor-made integration with top-popular plugins, including Elementor and Gutenberg.
- You can import complete individual pages to save a huge amount of time on building and customizing your site.
- AMP support for seamless site browsing on mobile phones and tablets, which is crucial for hotel bookings.
- Bespoke integration with WooCommerce to help you create an online store and sell extra hotel products and services.
- Most importantly, it’s loved by regular WordPress users as well as WordPress leaders across the globe.
And this list can get reeeeally long, so let’s now cover what it takes to build a hotel booking WordPress website and whether it can replace a proprietary property reservation software.
Why Would You Choose WordPress Over Proprietary Booking Engines/Cloud Software?
The short answer is – to cut down expenses and run a commission-free independent website.
Let us list just a few reasons why WordPress might be the right tool for the long run:
- WordPress is an enterprise-grade CMS, which means you can scale your website from a small hotel to a multi-chain enterprise with numerous rooms, properties, services, and bookings.
- Compared to proprietary booking engines, WordPress themes and plugins will cost you at least threefold less. The average annual charge for a proprietary software varies from $500 to $1000. Furthermore, they almost always charge extra commissions depending on how many rooms you have or bookings you received, while WordPress plugins and themes offer humble fixed prices per year or once (for a lifetime usage).
- WordPress is completely extendable – you can implement any plugin, theme, or code, while you have no freedom to customize the source code of the proprietary booking software.
- WordPress gives us numerous tools to improve your local SEO to put your hotel website in front of a larger number of prospects.
- With the advanced WordPress page builders like Elementor and the arrival of Gutenberg, you can create outstanding websites visually, customizing them the way you want.
WordPress (along with its plugins and themes, of course) has always been a more cost-effective solution compared to the cloud counterparts. Now, in these uncertain times of pandemic, it’s a true gem for the rental accommodation owners.
It’s up to you, though – you can use WordPress and third-party platforms at the same time, but then you should consider all the cons we’ve listed above.
Now let’s move on to the practical bit!
In this post, we’ll be using:
- Design base: a free Astra theme that will serve as a micro-niche WordPress hotel theme (you are free to go with any Astra version or demo site, though). Thanks to its polished minimalist styling and flexible customization options, Astra is a perfect starting point for turning the theme into a tailor-made website.
- Functionality powerhouse: the MotoPress WordPress Hotel Booking plugin with optional add-ons.
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