Morphos / Guide
What a hotel website actually costs
A breakdown by line, including the ongoing costs that usually appear after you have already committed.
Most hotel website quotes arrive as a single number with no explanation, which makes them impossible to compare. Here is the same project broken into lines, with what each one buys and what happens if you skip it.
The lines in a typical boutique hotel site
| Line | Typical range | What it actually buys |
|---|---|---|
| Direction and content | £1,000 – £2,500 | Property audit, competitor teardown, theme, motion direction, and the structure of every page before design starts. |
| Design | £2,000 – £6,000 | Room, offers, booking and language templates. Reviewed as whole pages, on desktop and phone. |
| Build | £2,500 – £9,000 | Hand-written front end, CMS wiring, booking integration, responsive image pipeline, accessibility. |
| Photography | £1,000 – £4,000 | An art-directed shoot, or careful editing of your existing library. Skipping this is visible in every screenshot. |
| Booking integration | £500 – £2,500 | Connecting your engine, styling the path, testing edge cases like sold-out dates and deposits. |
| Indexing and structured data | £300 – £1,200 | Sitemaps, canonical rules, redirects, Hotel and Offer markup, Search Console setup. |
| Ongoing: hosting | £0 – £40/mo | A CDN-hosted static site can genuinely be free at this scale. A heavy CMS will not be. |
| Ongoing: support | £150 – £600/mo | Updates, security, small design and content changes, monitoring, and someone to call. |
What actually moves the number
Three things, and none of them is page count.
The three real cost drivers
- Languages — each language is a content and QA pass, not a toggle. Two languages add roughly 15–25%; five change the project shape entirely.
- Motion — a scroll-driven film sequence costs design and engineering time. Used once, with intent, it can be two days. Used on every section, it is two weeks.
- Integration complexity — a booking engine that exposes a clean flow is half a day. One that requires custom work through an undocumented API is a week and a risk.
The costs that are not in the quote
Ask any studio what happens after launch. The honest answer includes: your own time (roughly five to fifteen hours across a project, mostly approvals), a photography shoot if the existing library is thin, and the first year of whoever maintains the site. A proposal that does not name these is not cheaper — it is just less complete.
How to compare two quotes fairly
Put them side by side against the same list: how many languages, how many room templates, who writes the copy, who shoots the photography, what happens to existing URLs, whether structured data is included, what the free-fix window is, and what the monthly cost is after year one. Most quotes collapse when this is done, because one of them quietly excluded half the list.
What is a realistic budget for a boutique hotel website in 2026?
£8,000 to £25,000 for design and build depending on room count, languages, motion and booking integration. Below £6,000 you are buying a configured template, which may be the right answer — but it is a different product, not a cheaper version of this one.
Why do quotes for the same hotel vary so much?
Almost always because they include different things. One quote may exclude photography, copy, booking integration or structured data. Ask for the same line-by-line breakdown from each studio and the variation usually shrinks to fit scope.
Are there ongoing costs after launch?
Yes. Hosting is £0–£40 a month at this scale. Support is the larger line: £150–£600 a month for updates, security, small changes and monitoring — or your own time, if someone internal takes it on.
Can we do it in stages to spread the cost?
Often, yes — launching with core room pages and one language, then adding offers, languages and integration later. Staging works best when the first stage is designed with the later ones already in mind.