Returning guests book direct.

Then you pay nothing more. The deposit covers the domain, the first hosting and the work already started. If you change your mind, ask for it back by email within 14 days of paying it, and I return it. The domain is registered in your name and stays yours. You see the site working first — your photographs, your rates, your calendar — and the rest is invoiced only once you have said yes. If you do not say yes we shake hands, and you owe nothing more. It is also why two of the answers below are "then do not buy this": talking somebody into this does not pay.

Probably true — and nobody is suggesting you switch it off. The platform earns the first booking: it found you. It does not earn the fifth. Your own site is where you send the people who have already stayed, and the ones who come from the sign at the gate, from Instagram, or from a friend. The platform calendar stays in sync.

You can, and it will be a business card. The difference is not the design, it is what happens when somebody presses “Book”: availability, a minimum stay, a seasonal rate, a card or bank payment straight into your account, an email to the guest, a notification to you. Cheap builders do that through a plugin that takes its own percentage of every booking. The calculator above says how many months this one takes to pay for itself.

At first they will not, and that is not where this site earns. It earns where somebody already knows your name: the code on the room door, the email after checkout, the link in your Instagram profile, the plate at the gate. Search arrives over a year or two and is a bonus, not the foundation.

That is the entire product. teatro.lt and roziunamas.lt are run every day by people who do not write code — from a phone, standing in a kitchen. Rates, dates, photographs, discounts, bookings. Training is in the price, and it does not stop after the first conversation: ask as much as you need, whenever I am reachable, and questions are never billed.

The most honest question on the list. The domain is registered in your name. The Stripe account is yours — the money never passes through me. You get the code and the database, and the server is ordinary Linux, so any developer can take it over. If I vanished the site would keep running; only the updates would stop.

The monthly is the server, the backups, the updates and the fact that I answer the phone. Stopping it does not take the site away: you take it with you and pay only for hosting. There is no lock.

Then do not buy this. On €1,500 of annual revenue the commission is about €225. Even if half your guests came to you directly, you would save less than the running costs. The calculator above gives your number: if the payback is longer than two years, stay on the platform.

iCal sync runs both ways, but I will not pretend otherwise: Booking.com and Airbnb fetch calendars every few hours rather than instantly — that is how the standard works. If you run tight, sync through Beds24 instead: the channels and the site agree within minutes. Or move to direct bookings only.

You refund it from your own Stripe or Paysera account — it is yours, so it is your money and your decision. You set the cancellation terms, and the guest sees and accepts them before paying. You do not have to call me or ask permission.

New guests do. So the reviews are carried onto the site with a link to the source, and the payment screen shows the usual card marks and Stripe. But the important part is this: that argument is about somebody who does not know you yet. The money this whole page is about comes from the ones who already do.

If it takes bookings and money, keep it — change nothing. If it is photographs and a telephone number, it is an advertisement, not a channel. And it does not have to be rebuilt: often it is enough to attach the calendar and the payments to what you have.