Good holiday cottage website design comes down to two jobs: make a stranger want to wake up in your stone cottage, cabin or chalet, and make it obvious how to book it. The best sites show the place and the date search on the same first screen, give every property its own facts, and work as well on a phone as on a laptop.
Below are six real holiday cottage websites, from a pair of stone cottages in the Cotswolds to a group of log villas in Finnish Lapland, each shown as it looks today on a desktop screen and on a phone. “Holiday cottage” is the British name for a self-catering rental. In North America the same kind of place is a vacation rental, a cabin or a chalet, and in France it is a gîte. The lessons carry over from one to the other.
What the best holiday cottage websites have in common
Put side by side, the six sites below keep doing the same seven things.
- A date search or a Book now button on the first screen. Four of the six put a date search on or just under the opening image: Chalets Hygge, Ylläs Villas, Domaine de la Forestière and Aire Naturelle La Folie. Eco Chic Cottages keeps a Book now button in its header, on a phone too, and Ardtornish puts one on every property card. Nobody has to hunt for the way to book.
- One tile or card per property, with the numbers that decide. Ardtornish’s cards give the number of guests, one feature (an enclosed garden, an events space, dog-friendly) and the arrival days. Ylläs Villas shows the guest count and a star rating on each villa, and Eco Chic Cottages shows how many each of its two cottages sleeps. Google’s vacation rental guidelines are a handy benchmark even if you are not in its program: at least eight photos per listing, including a bedroom and a bathroom, and the maximum number of guests.
- Arrival days and house rules stated early. Cottages usually change over on a fixed day, and the sites that say so save a message. Ardtornish lists the arrival day of each property, Ylläs Villas lays its stays out week by week from Saturday to Saturday, and Chalets Hygge has separate pages for pets and for the rental agreement.
- A promise or a story, not only a list. Eco Chic Cottages opens with a single claim, luxury and sustainability together. Aire Naturelle La Folie opens with the history of the farm, and Chalets Hygge explains what its own name means. A guest who remembers one sentence is a guest who comes back to book.
- Proof, close to the booking. Eco Chic Cottages shows a 4.9 out of 5 score, awards and press quotes. Ardtornish shows 4.7 out of 5 from 845 guest reviews. The Domaine de la Forestière puts a five-star classification badge on the first screen, close to the booking bar.
- A sense of place. People rent a landscape as much as a house. Chalets Hygge gives drive times from Montreal and Quebec City and says the trails, park and lake of Mont Orford are within 5 km of the chalet, Aire Naturelle La Folie has a hand-drawn map of the farm, and Ylläs Villas has a section on what to do in Lapland by season. Text about the area is also what gives Google something specific to rank you for.
- Fast and readable on a phone. Google indexes the mobile version of your pages, and it expects the same main content there as on the desktop version (see its mobile-first indexing guide). Its Core Web Vitals set the target for the main content at 2.5 seconds or less. On a cottage site that content is usually the opening photo, so its weight matters more than anything else on the page.
6 holiday cottage website examples
Each card shows the full home page on a desktop screen and on a phone; both scroll by themselves, so you see the whole page and not only the top. Domaine de la Forestière and Aire Naturelle La Folie are projects of ours. The other four are independent sites picked for what they do well. What follows describes the sites as we reviewed them in October 2026.
Eco Chic Cottages
Two award-winning cottages · The Cotswolds, England
One claim, said once and well: multi-award-winning five-star eco cottages in the Cotswolds. It sits on a photo of a stone terrace with loungers, and a Book now button in the header stays with you on a phone. Two large tiles come next, one for The Chestnuts (sleeps up to 8) and one for Culls Cottage (up to 6), then a row of award badges, a guest quote and a score of 4.9 out of 5.
The long text under the tiles sells details a guest can picture: stone floors, oak beams, inglenook fireplaces, kitchens equipped for cooking and a food pub within a short walk in each village. The sustainability story is stated as facts (a carbon neutral business, Gold accreditation with Green Tourism, EV chargers). The menu adds pages for children, dogs and local attractions, an accessibility guide for each cottage and a page of frequently asked questions.
Key takeaways
- One tile per cottage on the home page, with how many it sleeps, instead of one long list.
- Questions answered by pages of their own: children, dogs, accessibility for each cottage, frequently asked questions.
- Type
- Two self-catering cottages
- Location
- The Cotswolds (England)
- Booking
- SuperControl
- Languages
- English
Ardtornish
Highland estate with eight cottages and Victorian apartments · Scotland
The home page is a shop window for a whole estate. The opening banner promotes the current event (a Burns Night celebration when we looked) and the heading under it points to remaining availability for a Christmas getaway. Below, a stack of property cards gives each cottage or apartment a photo, the number of guests it sleeps, one distinguishing feature (a fully enclosed garden, an events space, dog-friendly) and its arrival days, with a Book now button on every card. On a phone, a band above the cards lists the arrival day of each property in plain words.
The self-catering page counts what is on offer: eight cottages sleeping 4 to 18, five Victorian apartments in Ardtornish House sleeping 5 to 21, the whole house for 46 guests on exclusive hire and a remote bothy. The estate is open to guests 365 days a year. A reviews block shows 4.7 out of 5 from 845 guest reviews, with 99% of guests recommending the estate (as of October 2026).
Key takeaways
- Arrival days written on every property, because they differ from one property to the next.
- A review score with the number of reviews and the share of guests who recommend, placed on the home page.
- Type
- Highland estate with cottages and apartments
- Location
- Morvern, Argyll (Scotland)
- Booking
- SuperControl
- Languages
- English
Chalets Hygge
Chalets to rent near Mont Orford · Quebec, Canada
The site sells a feeling before it sells a chalet: Slow Down. Find Your (re)connection. The opening photo is one of a set that rotates (in our capture, a woman reading in a hammock among the trees), with a search bar for check-in, check-out and guests laid over it; on a phone the search folds into a single Search button. Below, the page explains in plain words what hygge means, then lists summer activities within reach: hiking, cycling, paddling, Nordic spas, wine and cider, local food.
The practical information has pages of its own: one for each chalet by name, plus pages on amenities, pets, dog-friendly activities and the rental agreement. The location is given in drive times (an hour and a half from Montreal, two and a half from Quebec City) and in distance: the trails of Mont Orford, the park and the lake are within 5 km of the chalet. English and French each have their own address.
Key takeaways
- A page for each chalet by name, and separate plain pages for amenities, pets and the rental agreement.
- Location given as drive times from the two nearest big cities.
- Type
- Chalets between a mountain and a lake
- Location
- Orford, Eastern Townships (Quebec, Canada)
- Booking
- Lodgify
- Languages
- English, French
Ylläs Villas
Log villas for groups · Ylläs, Finnish Lapland
Premium Log Cabins in Ylläs, Lapland: the headline sits on a night photo of a snow-covered cabin under the northern lights, with the date and guest search in the middle of it. The villas come next, grouped by who they suit: four for big groups (Villa Astra for 12 guests, Villa Aurora for 16, Villa Polaris and Villa Stella for 8 each, each with a five-star mark on its card) and, for smaller groups from May to November, four apartments for 4 guests in Villa Aurora.
Because stays run from Saturday to Saturday, the page includes an availability grid, week by week, for all the villas at once, with open and booked weeks marked and a prompt to pick an open week so that the booking starts with the dates filled in. The site adds a section on what to do in Lapland by season, guest reviews that each name the villa, and an inquiry form with a rental selector.
Key takeaways
- A week-by-week availability grid for every villa on one screen, matched to Saturday-to-Saturday stays.
- Villas grouped by who they suit, with the guest count on the card.
- Type
- Log villas and apartments for groups
- Location
- Ylläs, Äkäslompolo (Finnish Lapland)
- Booking
- Lodgify
- Languages
- English, Finnish
Domaine de la Forestière
Cottages and cabins in a forest · Moselle, France
A former forester’s house, refurbished between 2021 and 2024, in a forest at Saint-Louis in Moselle, and a home page that gets to the booking quickly. The opening photo carries a five-star classification badge for furnished tourist accommodation, and right under it a bar asks for check-in, check-out, adults and children, with three short reassurances: real-time prices, secure booking, direct booking. On a phone the same fields stack in one column under the image.
The four stays can be booked whole or in parts: a large cottage for 6 to 10 guests and a small one for 4, which combine into a full house for up to 14, plus a pond cabin for 2 and a treehouse cabin for 2 to 4. A hot tub, an outdoor sauna and Nordic baths are presented in a section of their own with an online booking button, and the site also covers the history of the estate, activities and weddings. Bookings run on the Amenitiz engine.
Key takeaways
- A five-star classification badge on the first screen, close to the booking bar.
- A bar that asks for adults and children, so the availability shown already fits the party.
- Type
- Cottages and cabins in a former forester’s house
- Location
- Saint-Louis (Moselle, France)
- Booking
- Amenitiz
- Languages
- English, French
Aire Naturelle La Folie
Farm stay with a lodge tent, a studio and a cabin · Provence, France
The home page starts with a story rather than a list: a family farm at the foot of the Luberon, lived in since the end of the 19th century, where silkworms and a small menagerie once had their place. It took the name La Folie in the 1980s, a nod to the spring on its grounds and to the poet René Char. A booking bar with check-in, check-out, adults and children overlaps the bottom of the opening photo of the farmhouse, and a hand-drawn map of the estate (campsite, studio, farm, reception, vegetable plots) sits further down, so guests see where they would sleep before they read about it.
The accommodation page pairs each stay with a few lines of mood and a plain list of what is in it. The 32 m² lodge tent under a plane tree sleeps 2 to 4 with an open terrace, a refrigerator and a coffee maker; the studio has a kitchen, a mezzanine double bed and a sofa bed; the wooden cabin sleeps two. Pitches are there for tents and vans. The site is in English and French and runs on the Booky booking engine.
Key takeaways
- A hand-drawn map of the property on the home page, so guests see where each stay sits.
- Each stay told in a few lines, then listed by what is in it: kitchen, bed, terrace.
- Type
- Farm campsite with a lodge tent, a studio and a cabin
- Location
- Lagnes (Vaucluse, France)
- Booking
- Booky
- Languages
- English, French
The six sites at a glance
Two of the six run on Lodgify, two on SuperControl, one on Amenitiz and one on Booky. Four offer a second language; Eco Chic Cottages and Ardtornish are in English only.
| Website | Location | Type | Booking | Languages |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eco Chic Cottages | The Cotswolds (England) | Two self-catering cottages | SuperControl | English |
| Ardtornish | Morvern, Argyll (Scotland) | Highland estate with cottages and apartments | SuperControl | English |
| Chalets Hygge | Orford, Eastern Townships (Quebec, Canada) | Chalets between a mountain and a lake | Lodgify | English, French |
| Ylläs Villas | Ylläs, Äkäslompolo (Finnish Lapland) | Log villas and apartments for groups | Lodgify | English, Finnish |
| Domaine de la Forestière | Saint-Louis (Moselle, France) | Cottages and cabins in a former forester’s house | Amenitiz | English, French |
| Aire Naturelle La Folie | Lagnes (Vaucluse, France) | Farm campsite with a lodge tent, a studio and a cabin | Booky | English, French |
Cottage, cabin, chalet, gîte: use the word your guests type
The same stay goes by different names depending on where your guests live. A British family looks for a holiday cottage or a holiday let, an American one for a vacation rental or a cabin, a Quebec couple for a chalet, and a French visitor for a gîte. Holiday home is the broader term that covers all of them. Holiday cottage web design is as much a matter of wording as of layout: pick the word your guests use and put it in the title and the first sentence of each property page, followed by the place: “Stone cottage in the Cotswolds” says more to a search engine, and to a person, than “Our accommodation”.
Chalets Hygge does this well: the pages are named after the chalets themselves (Chalet Norwegian, Chalet Denmark), and the site separates what a visitor looks for into plain pages on amenities, pets and activities near Mont Orford. If you rent several types of stay, give each type its own page rather than one long list. A cabin and a cottage attract different searches.
How these sites take bookings
The six sites use four booking tools. None is right for everyone, so here is what each gives you and what it asks in return.
A builder with booking built in
Chalets Hygge and Ylläs Villas both use Lodgify. The search block, the availability calendar and the checkout come with the product, and a site can go live quickly. Ylläs Villas shows what a builder can do with strong photography and a week-by-week availability grid. The trade-off is a page structure that looks a lot like other sites built on the same product.
A dedicated booking system for cottages
Eco Chic Cottages and Ardtornish both load a SuperControl booking system inside their pages. The booking screens open inside the page, so the rest of the site stays free to be as editorial as the owner wants, as on the Eco Chic Cottages home page, which reads like a magazine page.
The Booky booking engine on a custom site
The Booky booking engine (page in French) is designed for tourist accommodation: guests choose their dates, book and pay on your own site. Bookings taken with Booky carry no commission. Aire Naturelle La Folie uses it, with a date bar placed over the opening photo. Booky is not the only option we work with: the Domaine de la Forestière site runs on the Amenitiz booking engine, and guests enter their dates, adults and children on the home page to see availability in real time.
Direct bookings and the big platforms
Booking platforms bring visibility. Your own site brings the direct relationship with the guest and removes the platform’s commission on every stay booked there. Many owners keep both and make the website the place guests come back to when they want to book again.
Rules and Google
If you rent in the European Union, check whether your country or city runs a registration scheme. Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 has applied since May 20, 2026. Where a registration scheme exists, hosts receive a registration number for their property and online platforms must display and verify it. Member states are not obliged to introduce such a scheme, so the rules differ from one place to another; if yours applies, leave room for the number on each property page.
Google documents a VacationRental structured data format, but it is intended for sites already connected to Google through a Technical Account Manager and Hotel Center. It is not something a plugin switches on. Hotel Web Design is listed in the official Google Hotels connectivity partner directory (see the directory). For most cottage owners, the work that matters first is simpler: one page per property, one page for the area, accurate photos and a fast mobile site.
Making a holiday cottage website easy to find
- Keep the opening photo light and never lazy-load it. Google’s web.dev guide on optimizing the largest contentful paint warns against lazy-loading the main image, because it then loads later than it should.
- Give each language its own address. Chalets Hygge keeps English and French under separate paths,
/en/and/fr/. Link the versions with hreflang as Google explains in its guide to localized versions. - Write about the area as well as the house. The distance to the beach, the trailhead or the village, the season, the nearest pub. A page on the area is also where a guest comparing two cottages makes up their mind.
- Keep the same facts on desktop and on a phone. Google indexes the mobile version, so a detail that appears only on the desktop page may not be indexed.
- Create a Google Business Profile for the property, with the same website address, the same name and the same photos.
How to create a holiday cottage website, step by step
- Decide what you rent. One cottage, several properties in the same place, or an estate with other activities such as a cafe, weddings or exclusive hire, as Ardtornish has. The site map follows from that.
- Choose how bookings are taken. A builder, a booking system, a booking engine on a custom site, or the system you already use. See the section above.
- Gather the photos. One series per property, shot in daylight: a bedroom, a bathroom, the main room, the garden or terrace, and a few views of the area. They are what makes people book.
- Write one page per property and one for the area. Concrete sentences: floor area, who sleeps where, equipment, arrival day, and the distance to the village, the sea or the slopes.
- Add the answers to the questions you get every week. Pets, children, accessibility, arrival and departure times, what is included. A page of answers on the site is a message that never reaches your inbox.
- Launch and learn. A unique title and description on each page, then a close look at which pages bring guests. This is the work we do in a website with online booking project (page in French); our search optimization page (in French) covers the visibility side.
Other types of accommodation
The same principles apply to other kinds of lodging, with their own particularities. We have examples for vacation rentals and villas in English, and for hotels, property managers and mountain chalets in French.
Questions about holiday cottage websites
What should a holiday cottage website include?
A date search or a Book now button on the first screen, one page per property with its facts (guests, bedrooms, bathrooms, arrival day), at least eight good photos including a bedroom, a bathroom and a common area, the house rules, a page about the area, and a mobile version that is as fast and complete as the desktop one. The six examples above do most of these in different ways.
Do I need a booking engine, or is an enquiry form enough?
For one cottage that changes hands a few times a year, a form and a calendar can be enough. As soon as guests ask about dates before they book, a booking engine saves the exchange: it shows what is free and takes the booking and the payment on your site. Options include the tool built into a site builder, a dedicated system for cottages, or the Booky booking engine on a custom site. Bookings taken with Booky carry no commission.
Should I use a website builder or a custom site?
A builder such as Lodgify is quick to set up and includes the booking tools; Chalets Hygge and Ylläs Villas show that it can look good with strong photos. The trade-off is a page structure shared with other sites on the same product. A custom site is shaped around your property and lets you choose the booking tool.
How many photos does a holiday cottage need?
Google's vacation rental guidelines ask for at least eight photos per listing, including a bedroom, a bathroom and a common area. Beyond that minimum, show the kitchen, the garden or terrace, the view and the area, shot in daylight.
Should my cottage website be in more than one language?
If guests from other countries book you, yes. Four of the six examples above have a second language. Give each language its own address and link the versions with hreflang, as Google explains in its guide to localized versions.
How do I get my holiday cottage website found on Google?
Start with the basics: one page per property with the word guests type (cottage, cabin, chalet) and the place in its title, a page about the area, fast mobile pages, a Google Business Profile with the same website address, and a unique title and description on every page. Structured data for vacation rentals exists, but Google reserves it for sites connected through a Technical Account Manager and Hotel Center.
Can I take bookings without paying commission?
Yes, for bookings made directly on your own site, because no platform sits in between. Bookings taken with Booky carry no commission, and its calendars can be synchronized with the platforms you also use, so a stay booked in one place is blocked in the others.
