The Nutty Bungalow is a studio BnB in Urunga. It is a gorgeous place to stay on a tranquil and secluded macadamia farm, minutes from the beach.

Hattie, The Nutty Bungalow owner, wanted to create her own website. Her aim was to stop using the booking systems like AirBNB, Stayz & Riparide, these sites charge approximately 15% in fees for each booking.

Getting off these major booking websites is a real challenge, how are your going to be found on google searches. When you search for accommodation the first two pages are paid ads. It’s impossible to rank above these big accommodation sites. Unless you are prepared to pay hundreds of dollars per click. So you need a good plan for ensuring continuing with fully booked room.

Hattie started to build a website in SquareSpace. She was only after something simple and thought this platform would be sufficient. It wasn’t far into the building of the site that she came across some complexity. A key application she wanted with the site was to have a booking calendar just to display booked dates. Sounds easy right, but for a novice the time to assess the application is time consuming. And Hattie had a full time job, so the time trying to build this feature was making her frustrated.

Also a key requirement for Hattie was that she wanted to get a good result with Google searches, and this is where SquareSpace falls down. It does not give you the strength of performance opportunity that other platforms offer.

Hattie put a notice on a Facebook group that she need help and I responded.

The outcome was a very simple but stylish website built in WordPress. WordPress is my preferred platform because of the power in application extensibility I can include in a website for a low cost of investment.

The Nutty Bungalow website has a couple of pages that will not change much over time. Included in this build is a calendar booking system that has awesome simplicity in her creating bookings. But also this plugin provides a future for if Hattie wants to take bookings online through this website.

Then the immediate power of this Booking Calendar plugin is it provides a way for Hattie to capture emails. When she is ready to move off the booking sites she will have a list of contacts that she can start approaching directly. Direct contacts, I believe will be the best way for her to compete with the big sites and keep her fully booked.

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