| Bouwnb | All-in-one tools (Smoobu, Sirvoy, Lodgify) | Built for you (WordPress + plugin) | Bedandbreakfast.nl | The big platforms (Airbnb, Booking.com) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A website of your own | Yes, eight designs, set up for you | Sometimes, often as a template add-on | Yes, that's the whole point | No, a listing on their site | No, just a listing on their site |
| What it costs | Free during the alpha, then one flat monthly fee | Around €16 to €60+ a month, often per room | €1,000+ to build, plus hosting and maintenance | €265 a year for the listing | No subscription |
| Per-booking costs | Never | Sometimes, up to 1.9% per booking on entry tiers | No | None, commission-free | 15 to 18% commission, on every booking again |
| Requests and confirmations | Yes, with automatic emails in your style | Yes | Depends on your plugin | Yes, through enquiries on their site | Yes |
| Calendar in sync with the platforms | Yes, through iCal; we refresh every 15 minutes, platforms read on their own schedule | Yes, often realtime, which is genuinely better | Doable yourself, with the same iCal trick | Yes, through iCal, the same mechanism as ours | Only their own calendar |
| Guests paying online | No, deliberately: payment goes directly between you and your guest | Often yes, with transaction fees | Possible, with a payment plugin added | No, guests pay you directly | Yes, they pay you out |
| Dynamic pricing | No algorithm; season prices plus your own per-date prices, for that one festival weekend | Sometimes, often as a paid extra | No | No | Yes, their algorithm joins in |
| Guest data | Erased two weeks after checkout, no tracking | Kept, often in a guest CRM | Your responsibility, GDPR included | Enquiries run through their system | The platform's, not yours |
| Multiple properties, teams | One B&B per site, with all your rooms on it | Yes, that's what they're built for | Build it yourself | One listing per B&B | Yes |
| Maintenance and updates | We do it | They do it | You do it, or you pay someone | They do it | They do it |
Where the others are genuinely better
The all-in-one tools win on three things: their calendar connections are often realtime where ours runs through iCal (we refresh every 15 minutes, but how often a platform reads our calendar is up to the platform), they have built-in payments, and they're made for people running several properties or a team. If you need that, you're better off with Smoobu or Sirvoy, and we mean that.
And Airbnb and Booking.com remain the best place to be found by guests who don't know you yet. That's why bouwnb works alongside them, not instead of them: the platform brings the first booking, your own site brings the returning ones.
And then Bedandbreakfast.nl, which honestly we're fans of ourselves. In principle they're exactly on our line: no commission, one flat yearly fee, enquiries rather than anonymous instant bookings, and payment simply direct with your guest. They just offer something different than we do: they're a place where travellers search, not your own website with a dashboard, calendar and automatic emails. Bouwnb is exactly that, but brings you no searching travellers in return. A listing there and your own site here complement each other precisely. Better still: you connect their calendar right in your bouwnb dashboard, through the same iCal sync.
What's next on the roadmap
No promises with dates; we build in the order the first owners need things. But these are the next things up:
- 01
Showing what booking direct is worth
You can already create discount codes, but nothing on your site says they exist. You will be able to add a line of your own, with your own percentage: booking direct costs your guest less than going through the platform. Which is the whole argument for having your own site.
- 02
See how many people look at your site
How many visitors your site had, how many of them reached the booking page, and how many sent a request. That is the difference between 'nobody finds me' and 'they find me but they do not book'. No cookies, and nothing about your guests kept.
- 03
Reviews of your own
A day after checkout your guest automatically gets asked for a review. It appears on your own site, not on a platform's, and your dashboard collects them all in one place. Reputation built somewhere that stays yours.
What used to stand here and is now done: your site registers itself with Google Search Console, and the arrival email with your own instructions goes out automatically the day before your guest arrives. Both are live for everyone.