What if we told you that your hospitality website might be built for the wrong guest?
Over the past year, more guests have discovered and booked accommodations outside your website. For the first time, 26% of travellers start their research on OTAs, officially surpassing search engines (21%) as the primary discovery tool. By the time a potential guest lands on your page, they’ve already done their homework.
Your website needs to be more than just a digital brochure; it’s the conversion engine of a broader digital experience strategy. We sat down with Martin Meijering, Web Manager lead at Maxxton, to break down how to thrive in an ecosystem where you must capture interest elsewhere to convert it at home.
In the past, your website was a net designed to catch as much traffic as possible. Today, it must be a spear.
The early stages of discovery and filtering have been outsourced to a complex ecosystem of OTAs, AI tools and search engines. Which means your digital experience strategy needs to win on two fronts:
The potential guests who used to browse your website are now validating their choice by it. They aren’t arriving to see if they like you; they’re arriving to confirm why they should book with you.
"The traffic that ends up on your website is becoming way more valuable. Quantity goes down, but the willingness to book from those visitors is way higher." - Martin Meijering.
Your goal needs to shift from attracting high-volume traffic to optimising for conversion quality. Every element of your infrastructure must be built to this high-intent booking behaviour, providing the precision needed to justify guests' decisions to book direct.
If the first front of the battle is discovery, then your primary objective is for OTAs, search engines and AI tools to capture your existence.
When a guest searches for a dog-friendly holiday park in the Loire Valley on Google, or asks an AI assistant for recommendations, the algorithms read, interpret, and rank information. If your website's information isn’t structured in a way these systems can understand, you are effectively invisible, or you may even be recommended for the wrong thing.
Getting cited is one of the most technically demanding and underestimated aspects of building a digital experience strategy.
"We need to make sure all the information on your website is structured in a way that it can be read by a human, but more importantly nowadays, it needs to be readable to machines - AI tools, search engines, the whole ecosystem."
So, what does this mean in practice? Your website has two layers. The visual layer is what guests see, like images, text, and booking forms. The structural layer is foundational, such as organised, machine-readable data that describes your accommodations, availability, pricing rules, facilities, and more.
Getting this right requires more than good copywriting or a nice design. You need a thoughtful content architecture and a CMS that outputs data in a format that modern discovery systems can parse and prioritise.
With Maxxton's Web Manager, this structured foundation is built-in. Every content entry maps to a clean data model that feeds search engines, AI tools, and connected distribution channels consistently. By building for machines first, you ensure that when the spear is thrown, it actually has a target to hit.
Online travel agencies (OTAs) like Booking.com are both competitors and partners. In 2026, navigating this relationship requires managing the fork in the road.
If the discovery phase is the fishing net, then the OTA is your most powerful ally in casting it. However, once the guest has discovered you, they reach the validation moment. Research shows that 80% of guests research on OTAs before booking direct. They use them to compare options, then visit your website to confirm their choice.
The goal is to ensure that when a guest moves from discovery to your doorstep, your spear is sharper than the OTAs, and this requires a digital experience that offers:
"See it as a competitor, but you need to be there. It's not that you can have every booking directly. So that's why you need to stay friends with the OTA. But at the same time, make sure that the content they use so that potential guests can find you is slightly less good than your own channels."
Maxxton's channel management allows operators to synchronise content and availability across platforms while maintaining strategic control over the direct channel, which includes the ability to give your own website access to availability before it is released to OTAs.
One of the most powerful and frequently overlooked capabilities of a well-built hospitality website is the ability to personalise from the moment of entry.
Landing pages and deep links help guests to arrive exactly where their search intent points. A couple searching for a pet-friendly stay should land on a page filtered for dog-welcoming accommodations, with relevant images and pre-applied search filters. Someone who saw a specific unit on social media should land on that unit's detail page.
"You need to start personalisation as early as possible, in the search engine or AI tool, and then make them land on your website as deeply as possible, not just on the home page. For example, on a landing page that is already aligned with what they were looking for."
Using dedicated landing pages is good for two reasons. First, it reduces friction. Every extra step a guest has to take to find what they are looking for is an opportunity for them to leave. Second, it signals relevance: a guest who lands on a page that immediately reflects their search intent is far more likely to continue toward booking.
In Maxxton's Web Manager, every filter parameter is encoded in the URL. Which means you can create an almost unlimited number of targeted landing pages (by accommodation type, travel party, season, interest, or any combination) without manually managing separate pages.
Most operators treat their booking engine like a digital cash register; it just sits there waiting for someone to press pay. But that’s a mistake. The booking engine is where intent turns into revenue, and if it isn't reacting to your guest, you're leaving money on the table.
A well-configured booking engine knows three things about every visitor before they've clicked anything:
Together, these signals let you personalise the entire booking experience without asking the guest a single extra question.
Let’s take the entry point as an example. If someone lands deep into your site straight from Google, they've likely skipped your homepage entirely, so the booking engine can add an orientation block to fill in the gaps. If they came from an email, you know they're a warmer lead and can strip back the hand-holding. If they came via ChatGPT, they've already done serious research and are close to a decision.
What the user types in tells you the rest:
The engine knows what to show and, just as importantly, what to hide.
Then there's browsing behaviour. If a guest spent 20 minutes in the same unit on Tuesday, came back on Thursday, and is now in the booking flow, the engine remembers. That unit should be sitting at the top of their results. Use what you know, just don't make it feel like you're stalking them.
Change framing - viewing owners and WOM (of existing guests who are happy about their experience) as additional channels,
Some operators treat booking confirmation as the end of the sales process, but it should be the beginning of the next phase.
Between booking and arrival, guests are in a uniquely receptive state; they’ve committed, they’re anticipating their holiday, and they want to feel good about their decision.
Well-timed, relevant communication delivers the highest return.
"You can do way more in the pre-arrival period than most of our clients realise. Their experience has already started. They are happy the booking is made, and you can start warming them up well before they arrive."
Maxxton's guest portal turns the pre-arrival window into structured engagement. Guests log in to review their booking details, access in-depth content about their accommodation and the destination, and pre-book activities and add-ons. Which serves three purposes simultaneously:
Guests who engage through the portal before arrival consistently demonstrate higher satisfaction scores and increased ancillary spend. The pre-arrival period can be a high-value touchpoint that most operators are leaving entirely unoptimised and gives you the opportunity to get ahead.
A common mistake is thinking the guest journey begins and ends on a screen you control. To win on the discovery front, you must view your owners and word-of-mouth as active, high-value distribution channels.
Happy guests are your most effective "net." Their personal recommendations, increasingly shared via social media, review platforms, and peer groups, feed high-intent visitors directly into your validation funnel, often bypassing OTAs entirely.
Crucially, this User-Generated Content (UGC) is exactly what search engines and AI assistants look for when deciding who to recommend. When guests post authentic photos and reviews, they are creating a trail of social proof that machines interpret as authority. By delivering an experience worth talking about, you’re feeding the algorithms the data they need to recommend you to the next thousand.
For operators managing privately owned accommodation units, the relationship with owners is an important operational dimension. Owners want transparency: they want to know who is staying in their property, what revenue they are generating, and how their accommodation is performing relative to the portfolio.
Maxxton's owner portal provides this visibility in a structured, self-service format. Invoicing, settlements, booking overviews, and contract information are all accessible in one place. Which reduces the administrative burden on the operator while giving owners the confidence that comes from real-time access to information.
The portal also handles complex ownership structures like a single owner with multiple units, a single unit with multiple co-owners, and accommodation reserved for owner use versus rental inventory. Edge cases like these are common in vacation rental operations, and getting them right matters for owner retention.
You shouldn’t need a tech degree to create a digital experience strategy that personalises the journey, drives direct bookings, and increases guest spend. But it can’t be a hack job either
It requires a holistic approach of:
"The question is no longer how to attract more visitors," says Meijering. "The question is whether your infrastructure is ready for the visitors who already intend to book."
Maxxton’s Web Manager is built on this holistic approach. It integrates your CMS, booking engine, guest portal, and owner portal into a single, structured ecosystem. So, if you’re building from scratch or integrating Maxxton into an existing digital presence, your setup is optimised for the 2026 guest's behaviour.
Remember, the operators who will win in this next phase of digital hospitality aren’t those with the most traffic; they are those with the best infrastructure, built by people who know exactly what they are doing.