Which hosting plan for a hotel, lodge or tour operator: photos, bookings and several languages

Choosing the Right Plan··· 164 views· 3 min read

The short answer: a tourism site lives on big photographs and several languages, and most visits come from abroad, from phones and from slow connections. To start, an entry shared plan is enough, if the images are well handled; what deserves attention is the booking engine.

What weighs, and what does not

Part of the site What to do
Photographs They make people want to book and they weigh a lot. Use WebP and do not load the ones below the fold: AVIF or WebP and Lazy loading.
Languages A site per language or a plugin that keeps each page in each language. See A multilingual WordPress site and hreflang.
Bookings An outside booking engine, embedded in the page, is usually simpler and safer than building one. If you take payments, see How online payments work.
High season Visits and bookings bunch up around dates. See Preparing for a traffic spike.
Reviews They count for a lot with people choosing. See Reviews and reputation.

How to choose, step by step

1 Start with the entry plan and upload images that are already shrunk.
2 Decide how you will handle the languages before writing, not after: changing the structure with the site full is work.
3 Choose the booking engine and test a whole booking, including the confirmation e-mail to the guest and the notice to reception.
4 Put the address, directions and contacts in text and a WhatsApp button.
5 Review the plan if the site has its own booking system running on the server, with many users at once.
Do not store card details on your site. A booking engine or a payment service takes care of that; the site should only send the guest there. If in doubt, ask first.
Many tourism visitors arrive on slow mobile data. A light site sells more than a beautiful heavy one: A site that loads on slow mobile data.

Building a lodging or tour operator’s site? Tell us the languages and how you want to take bookings.

Open a support ticket

In our plans

SituationPlanWhy
Starting out: one property, one site with the languages inside itPro1 site, 10 GB SSD NVMe, e-mail accounts for reception and reservations on your own domain, unlimited databases. The languages go inside the single site, with a multilingual plugin.
A separate site per language, or several lodges or propertiesPlus6 sites and 20 GB SSD NVMe for the photographs.
A group of properties, big galleries and videosUltra or BusinessUnlimited sites and 30 to 200 GB SSD NVMe.

When to move up: move up when the disk space runs low (tourism photographs are big and many), when you want a separate site for each language or each property, or when the confirmations sent to guests reach the plan’s limit of e-mails per hour in a busy week (100 in Pro, 200 in Plus, 300 in Ultra). A booking system of your own running on the server, with many users at once, is a case for a VPS or Cloud plan (VPS2 has 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM and 80 GB NVMe), where you control the server. Moving up can be done at any time without losing the site, and every plan has an automatic daily backup with free restores.

SEE ALSO

Image optimisation and WebP

A multilingual WordPress site: plugin options, URLs and what Google needs

Preparing for a traffic spike: a campaign, a launch or a live event

Which hosting plan for a restaurant: menu, photos and bookings

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