Custom booking system
Booking system for your website, without commission
A booking system for your website: availability pulled from Airbnb and Booking.com, and guests who book with you directly.
Hosts pay commission on guests they found themselves
A booking system for your website shows guests which nights are free and lets them request or book with you directly, with no platform in between.
Airbnb and Booking.com bring in new guests, and that is worth paying for. But the couple who came back for the third time, the family who heard about your place from friends, the walker who searched for your name: they book through the platform too, because your own site has no calendar. Every one of those stays hands a share of the price to someone else.
Then there is the admin. Three calendars to keep in line, emails asking whether Friday to Sunday is free, deposits to chase, and the risk of selling a night twice because a booking on one platform had not yet reached the other.
We are VBS, a studio in Ghent, Belgium, building websites and web applications for clients across Europe, in English. Below: the EU rules for short-term rentals, the gain per process, package or custom, and a worked example in euros.
The short-term rental rules that touch your bookings
Letting a holiday home in the EU comes with rules for the property, for the platforms and for your guests' data. A booking system that knows them helps you keep to them instead of forgetting them. How the platforms compare on fees is in Airbnb vs Booking.com for hosts.
| Rule | What it asks | What your system does |
|---|---|---|
| EU Regulation 2024/1028, since 20 May 2026 | Where a country registers short-term lets, platforms show your number in every listing and share data with the authorities | The same number on your own site |
| National or regional registration, for example Flanders | Every accommodation that hosts paying tourists registers, occasional lets included; online you get a number at once | Your number on the site and in every confirmation |
| Safety and insurance, again the Flemish example | A fire safety certificate, fire insurance and liability insurance | Expiry dates in your admin, with a reminder |
| GDPR, Article 5 | Guest data kept no longer than needed | A retention period per type of data |
| GDPR, Articles 28 and 33 | An agreement with whoever hosts your data; breaches reported within 72 hours | Hosting in the EU and a log of who saw what |
Every country fills in the registration part differently, so we read your local rules with you before we build. For the site itself the usual rules apply too: a privacy policy and, once you measure visits or retarget ads, a cookie banner. If your site runs on WordPress, read is WordPress safe?: a booking module stores personal data, so every plugin counts. For a guest house listed on Airbnb and Booking.com, see bed and breakfast booking software.
Airbnb, Booking.com and your own site in one calendar
Three weeks in October
Airbnbvia iCal
Booking.comvia iCal
Your own sitedirect, no commission
Your calendar
What is taken can no longer be picked by a guest on your site.
An example with made-up dates. This is how the calendar of No.4 Lange Ast works: the iCal feeds of Airbnb and Booking.com, plus requests through its own site.
No.4 Lange Ast lets guests request a stay directly
No.4 Lange Ast is a holiday home for eight in Huise, between Ghent and the Flemish Ardennes. It was already on Airbnb and Booking.com. On the site we built, in Dutch, English, French and German, an availability calendar reads the iCal feeds of both platforms.
A guest picks arrival and departure; the dates drop into the request form below. It runs as a plugin on the WordPress hosting the house already had, and has been live since 3 October 2026. A next version, where the owner approves a request from his email and the calendar syncs in three directions, has been built.
- Calendar from the Airbnb and Booking.com iCal feeds
- Request form with the chosen dates filled in
- In four languages
Every step of a booking, and what the system takes over
A booking system is more than a calendar. It takes over the steps you now do by hand, from a guest's first question to the email after they leave.
| Process | Today | With your own booking system | What you gain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Availability | Three calendars, and a booking you copy over yourself | The Airbnb and Booking.com iCal feeds in one calendar on your site, and your own bookings sent back to the platforms | No night sold twice |
| First question | An email: is Friday to Sunday free? | The guest sees what is free and picks dates | Less back and forth, a request that is right first time |
| Price | Season, minimum stay and cleaning fee worked out by hand | Price rules per season, weekday and length of stay | The right price every time |
| Confirm and pay | Asking for a bank transfer and chasing it | Confirm from your email or admin, take a deposit by card or local methods such as Bancontact or iDEAL | Paid before the guest arrives |
| Guest data | Spread over emails and messages | One file per stay, with a retention period | GDPR in order |
| Messages to guests | Welcome, keys and directions typed again and again | Emails at the right moment, in the guest's language | No forgotten email, even in high season |
| Overview | Checking each platform separately | Occupancy and revenue per channel on one screen | You see what each channel costs you |
The occupancy screen is really a small dashboard, built as custom software. Questions from guests outside office hours, about parking, dogs or the sauna, can be answered by an assistant built with AI for business from your own house rules.
For a restaurant or a venue the same idea works with time slots and tables instead of nights. Who works that evening can then be planned with staff scheduling software that looks at your reservations. For the site of a restaurant itself, see restaurant website.
Villa Lidia shows price and calendar in two languages
A price estimate with the request
On the Villa Lidia site a guest sees a price estimate once the dates are picked, and sends the request with the number of guests.
Availability in the guest's language
The reservation form and calendar of Villa Lidia, a villa in Umbria, run in English and Dutch; the owner manages them in a small admin panel.
Booking without commission
Guests who know you or find your site book with you. Payments, seasonal price rules and guest emails can be added.
Three holiday homes: commission against direct bookings
What a booking system for your website is worth depends on two things: how much commission you pay today, and how many hours go into calendars and emails.
First the commission. Airbnb charges most hosts a service fee of 15.5 percent of the booking under its single fee structure, which it is rolling out to all home hosts; hosts still on the split fee usually pay 3 percent, and the guest pays the rest on top of the price. Booking.com charges a commission per booking set in your agreement. In this example we assume 15 percent for Booking.com; your own rate is in your extranet.
Take a host with three holiday homes, 150 nights let per home per year, at an average of 160 euros a night. That is 72,000 euros in revenue. The figures are assumptions; run them again with your own lettings.
| Item per year | Today | With your own booking system |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue through platforms, half Airbnb and half Booking.com | 61,200 euros (85%) | 43,200 euros (60%) |
| Airbnb fee, 15.5% | 4,743 euros | 3,348 euros |
| Booking.com commission, 15% assumed | 4,590 euros | 3,240 euros |
| Payment fees on direct bookings, 45 bookings | 0 euros (bank transfer) | 443 euros |
| Hours on calendars, emails and follow-up, at 40 euros an hour | 4 hours a week: 8,320 euros | 1.5 hours a week: 3,120 euros |
| Sorting out one double booking, assumed | 400 euros | 0 euros |
| Total | 18,053 euros | 10,151 euros |
The sum. If the share of direct bookings rises from 15 to 40 percent, commission falls by 9,333 minus 6,588, or 2,745 euros. Payment fees come off that: 28,800 euros of direct revenue at 1.5 percent plus 0.25 euros per transaction, Stripe's rate for standard European cards, is 432 plus 11 euros. Guests paying with a UK card cost 2.5 percent plus 0.25 euros, other international cards 3.15 percent. Then time: 2.5 hours a week less, over 52 weeks, at an assumed 40 euros an hour, is 5,200 euros. Add the double booking that no longer happens and the difference is 7,902 euros a year.
So what may a booking system cost? In this example an investment of up to about 8,000 euros pays back within a year, and one of 16,000 euros within two. With a single home and few returning guests the gain is smaller and a package is often enough. What custom software costs in general, and how to choose, is in build vs buy software. If you need the whole site, see website design; for guests in several languages, multilingual website development. Guests do not find your site on their own: those searching for your house by name find you through a Google Business Profile and local SEO. For Les Terrasses de Durbuy, a villa in the Belgian Ardennes, we made reels and ads on Meta, the work described on Facebook and Instagram ads.
Channel manager or a custom booking module
A package such as Smoobu starts at 28 euros a month for one unit, excluding VAT, plus from 9.60 euros for each extra unit. That buys a lot. Custom work pays off where the package stops.
- Start
- Package (channel manager)Set up within a day, pay monthly
- Custom booking moduleFirst version in a few weeks, a one-off build
- Your site
- Package (channel manager)A booking button or widget in the package's style
- Custom booking moduleCalendar and request built into your own site, in your style and languages
- Price rules
- Package (channel manager)The rules the package knows
- Custom booking moduleYour rules: packages, families, dogs, late check-out, groups
- Integrations
- Package (channel manager)The platforms and payment providers of the package
- Custom booking moduleAlso your accounting, smart lock, cleaning team or own email service
- Data
- Package (channel manager)With the vendor, in their format
- Custom booking moduleIn your own environment in the EU, exportable whenever you like
- Cost over time
- Package (channel manager)Per unit per month, for as long as you let
- Custom booking moduleHosting and maintenance, not per unit
One home and a calendar? Take a package. Several properties, your own rules or a site that has to sell? Then a custom module earns its keep.
Guests pick their dates on a phone
Most guests look for a stay on their phone. That is why the No.4 Lange Ast calendar has its own mobile screen: one month at a time, large cells to tap, booked nights struck through, and a line saying when the calendar was last updated.
That last line matters. Airbnb refreshes an imported calendar about every three hours, and Booking.com itself says iCal syncing can take from a few minutes to a few hours. Show when you last checked, confirm a request only after a final check, and you never sell a night twice.
Booking module project: four phases to your first direct booking
- Call and lettings review, one to two weeksWe look at where you let today, what each channel costs, your price rules and your site, over video calls in English. You get a proposal with what the system must do and what it returns.
- First version, three to six weeksCalendar with your platforms' iCal feeds, request form, price rules and confirmation emails, on a test address with your real properties.
- Testing with your own bookings, one to two weeksYou and a few regular guests try it. We check the sync against your platforms until every night is right.
- Launch and upkeepLive on your site, with a backup and a way back. Payments, more languages or an admin panel follow whenever you want.
At No.4 Lange Ast and Villa Lidia, guests already book direct
We build booking systems as a custom web application, inside your existing site or in a new one. For No.4 Lange Ast as a plugin on their WordPress site; for Villa Lidia in Umbria, Italy, in a custom site with a reservation form, an availability calendar and a small admin panel that runs as a serverless function on AWS.
What working with us looks like from abroad:
- We start with your numbers: what each channel costs you and how many hours go into admin, and we say so when a package will do.
- Your platforms stay: Airbnb and Booking.com bring new guests, your site brings back the ones you already know.
- Your data stays yours: in the EU, under the GDPR, exportable whenever you like.
- Calls and documents in English, with prices in euros.
Tell us where you let today: book a call.
What hosts ask us about direct bookings
- Can my calendar work with Airbnb and Booking.com?
- Yes. Both platforms provide an iCal link. Your booking system reads them, so whatever is booked there shows as taken on your site, and it gives them a link back so your own bookings are blocked there too. Airbnb refreshes an imported calendar about every three hours, which is why you confirm a request only after a final check.
- Can guests pay straight away?
- Yes, through a payment provider such as Stripe or Mollie, with cards and local methods. Many hosts start with a request they confirm themselves and a deposit through a payment link. Your call.
- Does my registration number belong on my own site?
- Under the EU short-term rental regulation, platforms must show your registration number in every listing where your country runs a registration scheme. We put it on your own site as well, so guests see the same number they saw on the platform.
- Can you build for a property outside Belgium?
- Yes. Villa Lidia is in Italy. We read the local registration rules with you and build in the languages your guests speak.
- Will I lose guests if I rely less on the platforms?
- You do not have to take anything down. The platforms keep bringing new guests. Your own site catches the guests who already know you or search your name, and who until now booked with commission.
- What does a booking system for my website cost?
- That depends on what it must do: a calendar with requests, or also payments, seasonal prices and an admin panel. The worked example on this page shows what it returns per year; after a call you get a fixed price in euros.
Web application
How VBS helps you with this
We build software in the browser for your whole team, on every computer and phone, around the way you work.
- Roles and permissions per person
- Links to your accounting and your email
- Releases without downtime, with backup and rollback
How we approach it is on our page about Web application.
More direct guests, less commission?
Tell us where you let or take reservations today. We will work out what your own calendar is worth per year.
Rather get in touch right away?