Why your pet hotel's booking page should be on your own domain

Most pet hotel software gives your customers a portal on the vendor’s website: yourhotel.somevendor.com, or a shared login page with your logo in the corner. It works, and for plenty of businesses it’s fine. But it changes who owns the front door to your hotel, and the cost shows up slowly, in places that are hard to trace back.

Your name at the moment of trust

Someone who books at your address has dealt with you. Someone who books at a vendor’s address has dealt with a platform that lists you, and has noticed, in passing, that your hotel runs on software anyone can buy. Neither is a disaster. But if you’ve spent years building a name, it’s a shame to hand over the moment someone trusts you with their pet to another company’s brand.

Search: what the booking page earns

Links, reviews and mentions count for whichever domain they point to. When your booking page lives on the vendor’s website, every “book here” link in your Instagram bio, every local directory listing and every blog post about where someone left their dog helps the vendor’s domain, not yours. Switch vendors in five years and that history stays behind. On your own domain it keeps building under your name, and it helps your homepage too.

Email: who the message is from

A booking confirmation or vaccination reminder sent from a platform’s address is one step removed from you. When it comes from your own domain, it matches the site the owner just used, replies reach your staff, and whether it lands in the inbox depends on your sending habits, not on everyone else sharing the platform’s mail servers.

What “white-label” should include

The phrase gets used loosely, so pin vendors down. We think it should mean:

• The booking site runs on your domain, with HTTPS taken care of. You type the domain in; there’s no integration project.
• The design carries your colours and type, and the vendor’s name isn’t anywhere a guest looks.
• Invoices and reminder emails go out under your name, in the languages your guests read.
• If you leave, the domain and everything it has earned go with you, because it was never the vendor’s to keep.

When a shared portal is the right call

There’s a fair case for the other side. A portal on the vendor’s website is simpler for them to run at scale. If your bookings come mostly by phone from regulars, owning the domain may matter less to you than, say, a polished mobile app. If a vendor has everything else you need but not this, it’s a reasonable trade, as long as you make it knowingly and don’t discover it when you try to move.

This is the thinking behind Boardinn: every hotel gets its own booking site on its own domain, in one of five designs. The only trace of Boardinn is a small footer link the hotel can switch off. To see how the argument holds up against a specific product, try our comparison pages.