Tourism and accommodation
Websites for apartments and villas
Your own site where guests book directly, with no platform commission. Multilingual, with a gallery, prices and an availability calendar.
The standard Booking.com commission for private accommodation in Croatia is 15 percent. In the Preferred programme it rises to around 18 percent, and flat-rate hosts pay a further 25 percent VAT on that commission, because a foreign platform service is taxed in Croatia. Add Genius discounts and the online payment fee and the real share leaving each booking is usually between 19 and 25 percent.
On a direct booking through your own site none of that applies. All that remains is the payment processor fee, roughly one to two percent, and only if you charge a card up front.
A website does not replace Booking. It wins back the guests who already returned once, and the ones who saw you on a portal and then searched your name on Google.
What such a site needs
- Full-size photos, because accommodation is chosen with the eyes and nobody books what they cannot see
- Your guests’ languages, usually Croatian, English and German, each on its own address
- An availability calendar so a guest sees at once whether the dates are free
- An obvious way to get in touch: a form, WhatsApp, and a phone number that can be tapped on a phone
- A description of the surroundings, distance to the beach and parking, house rules and check-in times
- Fast loading, because guests search from phones, often on a weak connection
Prices on the site and a new obligation
From 1 October 2026 Croatian rules require a machine-readable price list for anyone who already publishes prices on their site, alongside the reference price from 10 September 2026. That applies to hosts showing per-period rates. If you publish prices, we handle that too, generating the price list from the same data so it cannot drift from what the guest sees.
From the portfolio
Božini Dvori is a trilingual site, Croatian, English and German, with separate addresses per language and weekly rates. Villa More in Makarska and Villa Vrata Jadrana near Opatija are sites of the same kind, each with its own emphasis: a pool and a view in one case, closeness to the sea in another, capacity for larger groups in a third.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
No, and you should not. Booking brings new guests who would not otherwise find you. Your own site captures the returning ones and those who saw you on a portal and then searched your name. Those bookings carry no commission.
It can, through an iCal feed or a channel manager if you already use one, so booked dates close across every channel. With only a few units it is often simpler and cheaper to update the calendar by hand than to pay for a monthly tool.
Not necessarily. Most hosts start with an enquiry and an email confirmation, with a deposit by bank transfer. Online payment makes sense once the volume of bookings makes manual confirmation a waste of time.
It depends on your guests. For Zadar County, Croatian, English and German cover the large majority. Each language gets its own addresses so Google can index it separately, rather than being translated in the browser.
Photos are the most important part of this kind of site, so they are worth investing in. If you do not have enough, we recommend a photographer working in Zadar and the surrounding area, and in the meantime build the site to work with a smaller set.