Is it worth having your own website when you already have Booking

When your own website is a waste of money

I will start with it because you can see its flaw without counting reservations. A website does not earn anything if the guest who lands on it finds nothing beyond what they already read on the portal. Then there is no reason to book with you. They go back to the listing, because there they have a familiar button, a booking history and the certainty that someone will answer for them if something goes wrong.

That is what a website that does not earn anything looks like. A nice full-width photo, a sentence about silence and being close to nature, a gallery tab, a contact form. No price. No check-in time. No answer to the question of whether you can bring a dog. Not even whether the property is open in winter.

A website without these things does not lose to the portal. It never enters the competition in the first place.

When your own website starts earning

When it answers everything the portal listing answers, and adds something the portal cannot give. The portal describes a property with form fields, identical for a hotel in the city centre and for a cottage by the forest. You can write that it takes seven minutes to walk from the gate to the trailhead, and show a photo of that path.

The second thing the portal will not do: the guest who has already stayed with you. They are not looking for a place to sleep, they are looking for you. They type your property's name into a search engine and land either on your website or back on the portal listing. This is the moment when your own website pays for itself fastest, because that guest would have come anyway, only through a middleman.

How much of this you really get back

I will not quote you a commission rate, because contracts differ and yours may not be the same as your neighbour's. Work it out from your own statement: take the amount the portal deducted for the past season and ask how many of those reservations came from returning guests. That is the part you could realistically have taken, and the only number that means anything here.

What a website needs before it can compete at all

1. A price. Even a range, even with a note that season and length of stay change it. A missing price reads as "expensive" or as "this place no longer operates".
2. Check-in and check-out times. The same ones as on the portal. If they differ, the guest will assume one of the versions is false and will pick the one safer for them.
3. The rules they will ask about anyway. Animals, parking, breakfast, children, smoking. Five sentences that save five phone calls.
4. A way to contact you that works today. A number you answer and an address you actually read. A form with no reply is worse than no form at all.
5. A date. A visible note of when the website was last updated. A guest who sees a price list signed three years ago assumes everything on that website is three years old.

The worst possible case

It is not having no website. It is a website that says something different from the portal. A guest who sees two different check-in times or two different prices does not ask which one is true. They stop trusting both and go to the property next door, where nothing contradicts itself.

This also works the other way, and owners usually do not see it. An out-of-date website does not just fail to bring direct bookings. It takes away bookings the portal was already going to hand you.

The short answer

Your own website is worth the money if you treat it as a second version of your portal listing, complete and consistent with the first. It is worth nothing if it is meant to be a brochure with photos. And if it says something different from the portal, it costs you more than having no website at all.