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Direct Booking Case Study
Vacation Rental Website Design That Wins Direct Bookings
Coast & Range Vacations — Fort Myers Beach, Florida & Clayton, Georgia
Coast & Range is a boutique rental and property management company with homes on the Gulf coast and in the north Georgia mountains. When they came to us they were Airbnb Superhosts with no website of their own — every booking, every guest and every review sat on someone else's platform. We built them a direct booking website on WordPress, then stayed on for the vacation rental SEO that makes it rank.
The Challenge
Why Vacation Rentals That Rely on OTAs Lose Bookings, Guests, and Margin
Coast & Range had the hard part solved. Beautiful, carefully chosen properties. Genuinely happy guests. Superhost status on Airbnb. What they didn't have was anything of their own — no website, no guest list, no search presence, and no way to take a booking that didn't cost them a percentage.
They had tried templated short-term rental website builders before us. Those attempts ended the way they usually do: a site that looked like everyone else's, couldn't be customised, and couldn't be found.
- No website of their own — the entire business lived on a booking platform
- Templated STR builders tried and abandoned: limited customisation, clunky design, weak SEO
- Every guest email address and every review owned by the platform, not the brand
- Commission and rising fees taken out of every single stay
- No clean way to add a new property without fighting the template
- Nothing ranking in local search for the towns they actually operate in
The Part Nobody Talks About
OTA Commission vs. a Direct Booking Website: What Each Stay Really Costs
A listing feels free, because nothing ever leaves your bank account. The money comes off the top before it reaches you, so it never looks like a bill. Run the numbers over a full season and the picture changes. On a property earning $60,000 a year, a blended 17% take is about $10,200 gone before anything else — and commission still turns out to be the smaller half of the cost.
The part most owners miss: the commission is annoying, but it's survivable. The real cost is that after years of hosting you still don't have a customer list, a brand anyone searches for, or a single guest who could find you without going through someone else first. A direct booking website is how a rental business stops renting its own audience.
The Build
How We Built a Hostaway-Integrated Direct Booking Website on WordPress
We worked directly with Lauren through the whole build — discovery, design, integration and launch — so the site matched how the business actually runs, not how a template assumes it runs.
Stage 01 Discovery
Short-Term Rental Discovery and Booking Strategy
Two regions, two very different guests. A Gulf-coast family booking a week by the water isn't making the same decision as a couple looking for a quiet weekend in the mountains. We mapped what each one needs to see before they commit.
Stage 02 Design
Custom WordPress Design for a Vacation Rental Brand
A fully custom WordPress build powered by Crocoblock, designed around the Coast & Range identity — refined, warm, and unmistakably theirs. Every property page written to sell the stay, not itemise the furniture.
Stage 03 Booking engine
Hostaway Integration for Direct Booking and Live Availability
Integrated with Hostaway so guests can filter by dates, size and features, explore the home, and book directly. Hostaway was the right engine here because Coast & Range are staying visible on the OTAs while they build direct — it keeps every channel in sync, so the calendar stays honest and nothing double-books.
Stage 04 Search
Vacation Rental SEO Architecture and Property Pages
Custom post types for properties, SEO-structured property pages, and an interactive map of nearby attractions — so the site answers what guests search for locally, not just what the portfolio contains.
Stage 05 Launch
Mobile-First Performance and Launch
Mobile-first, because most guests are browsing on a phone at eleven at night. Tuned to a 0.8-second load, QA'd across devices, then launched.
Stage 06 Since launch
Ongoing Website Care and Vacation Rental SEO
We didn't hand over the keys and disappear. Coast & Range are on our Essential care plan — health monitoring, UX improvements, and that load time held month after month — and we've since begun a twelve-month vacation rental SEO program to grow what the site can reach.
The Site
Inside the Coast & Range Vacations Direct Booking Website
The same path a guest takes: land, choose a home, get every question answered, book direct.
The user flow
01 Homepage
↓ Scroll the frame to see the full page
02 Property page
↓ Scroll the frame to see the full page
03 Detail & direct booking
↓ Scroll the frame to see the full page
The finished build
Built To Keep Growing
Vacation Rental SEO: Replacing OTA Traffic With Search You Own
A direct booking website removes the commission. It doesn't, on its own, replace the audience the platform was sending. That's the second half of the job, and it's where most owners stop.
Coast & Range didn't. We're now twelve months into a search engagement built specifically for rental portfolios.
- A consistent heading structure across every property — the home and its location, stated the way people search for it
- Dedicated landing pages for the towns they operate in, so each region can rank on its own terms
- Google Business Profile built out and optimised for local map visibility
- Mid-term stays positioned deliberately — monthly guests search differently to weekly ones
- Verified guest reviews surfaced on their own site, where they count towards trust and search
Coast & Range Vacations
Coast & Range Vacations Client Review
★★★★★
I had the pleasure of working with Tamara and Your Wish Digital for my company's new website build; Tamara is a consummate professional and I highly recommend working with her company. The onboarding process was consultative; it was clear from our initial discovery call that she had a deep knowledge of my industry and what we needed to include in our site development to best serve our clients. She made excellent suggestions for site functionality, recommended capabilities that I didn't even know were available, and focused on building an optimized site from the ground up. When I threw curve-balls during site build-out, she handled them with ease and adapted framework and design to accommodate my changing requests. She worked quickly & efficiently, and effectively communicated throughout every stage of the process.
Get a Direct Booking Website for Your Vacation Rental
If you own rentals and everything runs through someone else's platform, the fix isn't a prettier listing. It's a direct booking website that takes the booking, keeps the guest, and gets found on its own — then vacation rental SEO to keep the bookings coming. That's the work we do, and we stay on afterwards.
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