Top 5 Best Vacation Rental Website Builders in 2023

Want to create your own vacation rental website? Having a website for your Airbnb or other short-term rental properties is a good idea for lots of reasons, and the good news is: it’s easier than ever to build your own website with a vacation rental website builder.

Here’s a list of the best vacation rental website builders on the market today:

1. Floorspace – Easy to set up, professionally designed templates, affordable pricing, and flexible booking options. Requires third-party integration for direct bookings.
2. Lodgify – Comprehensive vacation rental property management system (PMS) with a relatively robust built-in direct booking website builder.
3. OwnerRez – Comprehensive PMS with optional website builder, competitive a-la-carte pricing, and excellent customer support.
4. Hosthub – PMS known for their best-in-class channel manager feature. They offer a separate website builder product for a one-time fee.
5. Hostaway – Advanced PMS platform with a basic built-in direct booking website builder feature.

To help you decide which is best for you, we’ll review each of these in more detail, as well as discuss what to consider when choosing the best vacation rental website builder for your specific needs.

First Things First, Do You Want to Take Direct Bookings?

Before choosing a website builder, it’s helpful to decide if you want to offer direct bookings—because this can significantly impact how you build your website. There are a lot of benefits to a direct booking site, but it may or may not be part of your plan right now.

If you don’t want direct bookings, then you can use any website builder, and simply add links to your Airbnb, Vrbo, or other listings. The Floorspace website builder is perfect for this, but you could also use a more general website builder like Squarespace or Wix.

If you do want direct direct bookings, here are 2 options for creating a direct booking vacation rental website:

Option 1: Use the Built-in Website Builder of Your PMS

Most vacation rental property management systems (PMS) offer built-in direct booking website builders. The best ones that made our list of top picks are Lodgify, OwnerRez, and Hostaway. If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution for your vacation rental PMS and website builder, these are great options.

Option 2: Add Direct Bookings to a Separate Website (Recommended)

But in most cases, we recommend adding direct bookings to a website that’s separate from your PMS. This means you’ll create a website (using a website builder like Floorspace, Squarespace, or Wix), and connect a third-party PMS app to handle direct bookings.

We recommend this approach for 2 main reasons:

1. Don’t lose your website if you change your PMS. If you ever leave the PMS or booking software your website is built on, you’ll have to completely rebuild your website. By keeping your website separate from your PMS, your website can stay online forever in the same place, regardless of your backend booking software.

2. Built-in website builders are limited. PMS platforms have pretty limited website builder features. Some are better than others, but most are very basic in terms of template design, creating custom pages, blogging, and other website and marketing features. By keeping your website and PMS separate, you can choose the best software for your business based on core features like channel management, automations, and guest messaging—rather than whether their website builder feature meets your needs.

The Best Vacation Rental Website Builders (Reviews)

Now let’s take a closer look at each of the vacation rental website builders on our list.

1. Floorspace

Floorspace started out as a custom web design studio for vacation rentals. After many years designing and building custom websites for hosts and property management companies, we released our own DIY vacation rental website builder and template. If you want an easy way to get a vacation rental website set up, that will connect to any booking software, the Floorspace website builder is a great option.

For direct booking websites, you can connect or embed your PMS booking forms. For non-direct booking websites, you can simply add links to your Airbnb, Vrbo, Houfy, or other online listings.

Here are some examples of Floorspace websites that integrate with different direct booking software options:

• Amethyst Properties – uses Hostfully for bookings
• Arrivls – uses Uplisting for bookings
• Parker Chase – uses Hospitable for bookings
• Spot – uses Guesty for bookings
• Refined Stays – uses Hospitable for bookings

We recommend using Floorspace if:

1. You want a professionally designed vacation rental website, and you’re using a PMS for direct bookings
2. *or* You’re not planning to take direct bookings yet, and you want to create a website for your Airbnb or other listings

To get started with Floorspace, sign up here.

2. Lodgify

Lodgify is one of the most popular vacation rental website builders on the market today. They hope to establish themselves as the “Shopify for vacation rentals.” Their strength is in being an all-in-one PMS and website builder—though their web design and blogging features are fairly limited compared to most general-purpose website builders. That said, you can find many examples of well-designed Lodgify websites on the web. Here’s one example.

If you are looking for a basic website builder with a ton of automation features and integrations that will make your life easier, Lodgify is one of the best options available.

We recommend Lodgify if:

• You want an all-in-one PMS and website builder, and you like the Lodgify website templates
• *or* You want to easily embed the Lodgify booking forms on your external website

If Lodgify sounds like a good fit, start your 7-day free trial.

3. OwnerRez

OwnerReservations or OwnerRez is quietly growing a very committed user base because of their robust feature set, low price, and responsive customer service. The OwnerRez website builder is quite basic, but you can easily create a simple, clean, and attractive website. Here’s an example of an OwnerRez-hosted website.

We recommend using OwnerRez if:

• You want an all-in-one PMS and website builder, and you like the OwnerRez website template
• *or* You want to add OwnerRez widgets to your WordPress or other external website

If OwnerRez sounds like a good fit, start your 14-day trial.

4. Hosthub

Hosthub (formerly Syncbnb) was originally built as a channel manager, with a goal of keeping all of your calendars in perfect sync across multiple channels. They have an excellent channel manager feature, with over 200 channel integrations and a Zero Double-Booking Guarantee. They have since introduced a separate website builder product. For a one-time fee, they will help you set up your direct booking website, which you own and host yourself.

We recommend Hosthub if:

• You want to use their best-in-class channel manager, and you want to own and manage your own website for a one-time fee.

To get started with Hosthub, sign up for a free 14-day trial. Once you’ve created an account, you can purchase the “Website Builder” add-on product.

5. Hostaway

Hostaway is an comprehensive and advanced vacation rental property management system, with a lot of features and integrations. They’ve taken over a great deal of the market, and they have some excellent reviews. Their website builder is a bit limited, but it gets the job done, and they have multiple booking forms and widgets that you can embed on an external website.

We recommend Hostaway if:

• You need an advanced PMS with lots of integrations and features, and you want to easily create a basic vacation rental website.

If Hostaway sounds like a good fit, you can request a free demo.

Getting Started

Here’s a quick look again at the best vacation rental website builders to choose from. There are others, but one of these should fit your needs.

1. Floorspace – Easy to set up, professionally designed templates, affordable pricing, and flexible booking options. Requires third-party integration for direct bookings.
2. Lodgify – Comprehensive vacation rental property management system (PMS) with a relatively robust built-in direct booking website builder.
3. OwnerRez – Comprehensive PMS with optional website builder, competitive a-la-carte pricing, and excellent customer support.
4. Hosthub – PMS known for their best-in-class channel manager feature. They offer a separate website builder product for a one-time fee.
5. Hostaway – Advanced PMS platform with a basic built-in direct booking website builder feature.

Other PMS platforms with basic direct booking website builder features include: Uplisting, iGMS, Hospitable, Hostfully, Guesty.

Learn more about how to build a direct booking website, and how to optimize your website design for bookings.

And if you have questions or you’re interested in learning about our custom vacation rental websites, contact us and we’d be happy to answer any questions you have.

Written by The Floorspace Team

This article was written as a collaborative effort by multiple members of the Floorspace team. We're a group of internet marketers and designers, with a wide range of experience marketing and managing short-term rentals.