Why hotels still pay 1995 prices for websites in 2026.
There is a chart that explains most of the absurdity in the current hotel-website market. It would plot two lines from 2015 to 2026. The first line, the actual cost of producing a modern hospitality website, drops nearly 90%. The second line, the price quoted to hotels by web agencies, stays roughly flat. The space between those two lines is where margin lives.
This isn’t a moral failing on the part of agencies. It’s the natural lag between a technology shift and a pricing shift. The technology jumped — modern frameworks, AI agents, edge hosting — and the pricing didn’t, because most clients don’t know it should have. So agencies kept billing 2015 rates for 2026 work.
Why hotels in particular
Hospitality is uniquely susceptible to this gap for three reasons.
One: hotels rarely commission websites. A 30-room boutique might do it twice in a decade. By the time they’re ready to do it again, the market has shifted underneath them, and they have no baseline for what reasonable looks like.
Two: the buyers are operators, not technologists. A general manager evaluating a website quote doesn’t have the vocabulary to push back on whether €4,000 of “responsive design” work is fair or whether “custom CMS development” is necessary in an era of free, excellent CMSes.
Three: hospitality web agencies have aggressively positioned themselves as “hospitality specialists,” which lets them justify premium pricing without doing materially different work than any other agency. The specialty is largely vocabulary — they know what an OTA is — not engineering.
What’s about to happen
Markets correct. The gap between actual cost and quoted price is now large enough that it attracts new entrants. Some of those new entrants will be productized services like Astia. Others will be solo operators using AI agents to undercut agency pricing by 80%. Others will be platforms that take the agency layer out entirely.
In five years, the standard hotel website project will cost a fraction of what it costs today. The hotels that figured this out early will redirect the savings into actual revenue generation — better photography, better content, better integrations. The hotels that didn’t will keep paying 1995 prices until their agency goes out of business and they’re forced to.
What to do about it now
If you’re currently quoted €20,000 or more for a hotel website project, ask three questions before signing.
One: what framework will it be built on, and why? A confident answer that includes the words Astro, Next.js, or SvelteKit is reasonable. “WordPress” in 2026 is a yellow flag at best.
Two: where will it be hosted, and what does that actually cost? If they’re marking up hosting on a server they manage, expect to pay 5–10x what edge hosting would cost direct.
Three: how does ongoing maintenance work? If the answer is “we quote each change individually,” you are about to enter the agency-retainer trap that has been the industry default for fifteen years.
None of this means agencies are bad. The best ones do excellent work. But knowing what the work actually costs is the difference between paying for value and paying for opacity.