Behind the Desk Website
Bed and breakfast website: what it needs
GuestJourney editorial team, edited by Alon Shkuri
A bed and breakfast website needs five things: where you are, your rooms with photos, a price, how to book, and how to reach you. We checked 10 B&B sites on 1 November 2026. 8 showed a book button on a phone, one of them tiny, on 6 no banner hid it, and 3 did not fit the screen. That is where to start, ahead of any new design.
What Merel refuses to learn
Merel runs De Linde, a bed and breakfast with four rooms. She makes the breakfast, changes the beds and takes the phone with flour on her hands. On Sunday her sister Anna, who runs Hotel Kadeloft, opened the De Linde site at the table and had to pinch the screen to read it.
So that night Merel takes a sheet of paper and writes down what she is not going to learn.
Merel, De Linde, Anna and Hotel Kadeloft are made up. The sites we measured below are real.
She can keep that list. A site for four rooms has few jobs. To see which, we opened ten B&B sites.
What we saw on 10 B&B sites
We looked at the homepages of 10 bed and breakfasts in the Netherlands, Belgium and the UK that have a site of their own, on a phone-sized screen, and checked each first screen by eye. Where the size was stated, they ran from one suite to 14 rooms. Ten is a small number: the Dutch business register alone counted 3,583 B&Bs on 1 January 2026. B&Bs that only exist on a platform are not in it, so read this as what we saw and not as a market figure.
3 of the 10
B&B sites we checked did not fit a 390-pixel phone screen.
Our own measurement, 1 November 2026. Ten B&Bs we looked up ourselves, not a market figure.
They failed in three ways. One sent its desktop page at 1,001 pixels wide and let the phone shrink it, so the text was tiny and the phone number and email sat inside a header picture. One came out at 494 pixels. One was only 8 pixels too wide, which is enough to make a page slide sideways under your thumb.
| What we looked for | B&Bs |
|---|---|
| Book button with a readable word in the first screen | 8 of 10 |
| Of those, with no cookie banner on top of it | 6 of 10 |
| Booking goes to a booking engine | 6 of 10 |
| Booking goes to a B&B platform | 2 of 10 |
| Booking by phone or email only | 2 of 10 |
| Page does not fit a 390-pixel phone screen | 3 of 10 |
| Phone number or email in the first screen | 3 of 10 |
| A room price on the homepage | 2 of 10 |
Set that next to the 20 small hotels we checked. A room price on the homepage: 2 of the 10 B&Bs, none of the 20 hotels. A phone number or email in the first screen: 3 of 10 against 2 of 20. A page that did not fit: 3 of 10 against none of the 20.
What an owner who does everything really needs
- Where you are and what you are, in one sentence. "Three rooms in a farmhouse, ten minutes from Maastricht by bike."
- Your rooms, with real photos. Your own, in daylight, with the bed made. Say how many people fit and whether the bathroom is private: that is one email less.
- A price. "From €95 for two, breakfast included" saves you another one, and only 2 of the 10 did this on the homepage.
- A way to book. See below.
- A phone number and an email. You are the hotel. Say when you pick up as well: the Dutch Chamber of Commerce advises B&B owners to state clearly at what times and how they can be reached.
Then the usual questions: breakfast and when, parking, arrival time and how to get the key, children, pets, how to pay. Write those down once, in your own words.
| Question | What Merel writes |
|---|---|
| Breakfast | From 8:00 to 10:00 at the big table. Tell me the day before if there is something you can't eat. |
| Parking | In the street, free after 18:00. |
| Arrival and the key | From 15:00. Later than 20:00? Send me a message and the key will be in the box by the door. |
| Children | Room 3 takes an extra bed. No cot, sorry. |
| Pets | No pets. My cat runs the house. |
| Paying | Card or cash when you leave. |
Three ways to take a booking
It depends on how many rooms you have and how often the phone interrupts you. Among the 10 we checked, 6 used a booking engine, 2 a B&B platform and 2 only took bookings by phone or email. (One of those two said on its site that its booking provider was down, so a live count could be 7 and 1.) Both platform sites used Bedandbreakfast.nl.
| Way | Good for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Email or phone only | One or two rooms, and you like the contact | A guest at 11 at night can book elsewhere before you wake up |
| A B&B platform embedded in your site | No technical work | You are on their terms, and you often pay per booking. Check how much |
| Your own booking engine | Three rooms or more, or several channels | A fee of its own. Your calendars must stay in sync |
If you also sell through Booking.com, the risk with email-only is a double booking, because your calendar is in your head. That is the moment we would start looking at an engine. Compare what it costs with what you now pay in commission, here with De Linde's made-up numbers. Yours go in the commission calculator, which takes a minute.
| Step | Sum | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Room nights sold | 4 x 365 x 50% | 730 |
| Room revenue | 730 x €95 | €69,350 |
| Through Booking.com | 40% of that | €27,740 |
| Commission at 15% | 15% of that | €4,161 |
| If 5 points of revenue move to direct | 15% of €3,468 | €520 less |
Hold that last line against the engine's price, and leave the whole €4,161 out of it: we assume most of those guests would not have found Merel without Booking.com. If the engine costs more than €520 a year, her reason for buying one is the calendar and the sleep, and that can be enough.
Template or designer: let the phone decide
Search for bed and breakfast website templates and you get a long list. We have not tested them, so we won't tell you which are the best bed and breakfast websites. Whatever you pick, a b and b website design has to survive these checks, in our view:
- Open a live example on your phone, with your longest room name in it. Does it still fit?
- Can you tap the phone number?
- Can you change the breakfast time yourself, and where the Book button goes?
What Google makes of a B&B
Google's page on lodging categories files a bed and breakfast under its hotel properties: a private or small commercial property that usually has the owner or manager present. Without a front desk or on-site management you are likely a vacation rental, and Google then only shows an individually owned rental through a booking site connected to it. Pick the right category first.
Point your profile's website link at your own site rather than a platform page, keep your photos and details current, and answer your reviews. Two things follow from that hotel category. The rule on posts says hotels cannot post offers. It speaks of hotel businesses without naming B&Bs, so reading it as yours is our interpretation: see what you can post. And if you have a booking engine, ask whether it connects to Google's free booking links.
What you can leave out
- A blog you will not keep up. A page dated 2019 makes us wonder whether the place is still open.
- An about page in the third person. You are a person: say "we".
- A photo gallery of fifty images. Twelve good ones per room type will do, in our view, and a phone has less to load.
- A contact form as the only way in. Show the address.
Test it this evening
- Open your site on your phone. Does it fit, with no sliding sideways?
- Can you see what it costs for two people for one night?
- Can you book, or at least see how, without scrolling?
- Is the telephone number tappable?
- Ask someone who has never been there how to get the key. Can they find it?
The smallest site that works
All of this fits on one page if it has to.
- One sentence and one photo at the top, with a Book button and a phone number you can tap in the first screen.
- One block per room: a few photos, how many people, private bathroom or not, the price for two.
- The six answers from the table above.
- One way to book: your engine, your platform page, or with one or two rooms the phone, with the hours you pick up.
- The address and how to get the key, with a link that opens a map.
Merel holds it next to her sheet of paper. Not one line on it asks for a plugin.