Apartamento Bajamar
A licensed holiday apartment in northern Tenerife with views of Mount Teide and the natural pools five minutes away. It was 100% dependent on Booking and Airbnb. Now it has its own website, a direct booking engine and a system where every guest who walks through the door becomes a commission-free booking channel.
- Cliente
- Apartamento Bajamar (private ownership)
- Sector
- Holiday rental · Licensed tourist accommodation
- Ubicación
- Bajamar, northern Tenerife. Carretera General de Bajamar.
- Licencia
- VV-38-4-0093899 / T1546
- Idiomas
- Spanish, English, French. Human translation.
- Tecnología
- Custom PHP. Booking engine with dynamic pricing. No WordPress. No Lodgify. No Smoobu. No builders.
- Web
- apartamentobajamar.com
An apartment with a Booking score of 9 that was giving away 15% of every reservation. Every single one.
The apartment was already performing well. Good reviews, good occupancy, a steady flow of guests. But every reservation — the first, the second and the third from the same guest — went through Booking or Airbnb. Between 15% and 20% commission each time. A returning guest who already knows the apartment, who already has the owner's phone number, kept booking through Booking because no other option existed. And when recommending the apartment to a friend, the Booking link was shared. Commission once again.
Without a dedicated website there is no way to break that cycle. It is not merely a Google visibility issue — it is an infrastructure problem. Without a site where direct bookings can be made, every satisfied guest continues to generate commissions for a platform that has done nothing to earn that repeat booking.
Direct booking. No commission. No intermediaries.
A functional booking engine was built and integrated into the website. Date selector, number of guests, automatic price calculation per night based on occupancy (1 or 2 persons), a fixed cleaning fee of 45€, a 19% discount for stays of 30 nights or more, and an option for a non-refundable rate with an additional 5% discount. Conditions clearly displayed: minimum 3 nights, free cancellation up to 5 days before arrival. Everything calculated in real time before confirmation.
This is not a contact form saying "check availability". It is a system where the guest sees the exact price, selects the rate and proceeds with the booking. Without leaving the website. Without going through Booking. Without commission.
Google is only the first door. The second is opened by the guest.
The website ranks in search engines, yes. Title tags with location, VacationRental schema markup, hreflang for three languages, linked Google Business Profile. A traveller searching "apartment bajamar tenerife" finds the website before many platform listings. But that is only the first layer.
The second is more powerful and has nothing to do with SEO: inside the apartment there is a sign with a QR code and the direct booking URL. Every guest who enters — whether from Booking, Airbnb or anywhere else — sees that URL. If they want to return, they book directly. If they want to recommend the apartment to someone, they share the link to apartamentobajamar.com. Not the Booking link.
This means the first booking may still arrive via a platform, but the second, the third and every referral booking no longer incur commission. The website does not compete with Booking — it turns Booking into an acquisition channel whose commission is only paid once. From that point on, the guest has a place to book without intermediaries.
A sign with a QR code does not work without a website behind it that allows real bookings. And a booking engine does not work without a website that has convinced the guest it is more convenient and more affordable to book directly. The two go together.
Each page answers the question the traveller asks before booking.
Rather than a website with a photo gallery and a booking button, a platform was built with content designed for each stage of the decision. The apartment page shows the space: living room, kitchen, bedroom, terrace with mountain views, no buildings in front. The surroundings page sells Bajamar as a destination: natural pools, coastal walks, papas con mojo, Atlantic fish, local wines. The traveller does not just understand where they will sleep — they understand where they will be.
This is what Booking does not do. On Booking, the apartment is one listing among 40 in the same area. Here, it is an experience told with intention.
Everything a holiday rental needs to operate without platforms.
Home page with value proposition, featured gallery and CTA to bookings. Apartment page with real photographs of each room, space features and proximity to points of interest. Surroundings page with content about Bajamar as a destination — natural pools, gastronomy, walks, climate, connections. Booking engine with dynamic price calculation per person, duration discounts, non-refundable rate, cleaning fee and validation of dates and minimum nights. Contact page with a form protected by reCAPTCHA. Booking conditions published as a standalone legal page. Legal notice, privacy policy, cookie policy with granular consent management (necessary, functional, analytics). Credits page. Tourist licence displayed in the footer of every page.
3 native languages: Spanish, English and French. Because guests searching for northern Tenerife come from Spain, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. And each must find the website in their language and be able to book without switching platform.
Custom PHP code. No WordPress, no Lodgify, no Smoobu, no holiday rental website builders. Fast, lightweight, indexable.
The same technical rigour as an industrial platform.
Custom PHP with a clean structure. Booking engine with dynamic server-side calculation: prices per person, duration discounts, non-refundable rate, cleaning fee, date validation and minimum nights. It is not merely cosmetic JavaScript — the calculation is validated server-side before processing.
Schema.org LodgingBusiness and VacationRental for Google. Automatic hreflang for 3 languages. Open graph for social sharing with image and description per page — essential when a guest shares the link in a WhatsApp group and what appears is a preview with a photograph of the terrace, not a broken link or an empty preview. WebP compression on all images, native lazy loading. Cookie management with granular consent. Contact form with reCAPTCHA, server-side validation and CSRF protection. CSP security headers.
A holiday apartment does not require less technical rigour than an industrial manufacturer. It requires the same. Because it competes with Booking, Airbnb and another 40 apartments in the same area. And because when a guest shares the link with a friend, what appears in that WhatsApp preview is what determines whether they click or not.
From platform dependency to building a direct channel.
Estimated data based on average occupancy and average price per night. The percentage of direct bookings grows over time as the repeat and referral channel accumulates.
Visible where travellers search.
Google Spain. 2026.
Fully verifiable. Open audit.
Direct contact with the apartment owner is facilitated to assess the quality of the work delivered and the impact on direct bookings.
Request referencesDirect contact with the client. No intermediaries.
Is the holiday rental 100% dependent on platforms?
adrian@portocarreroweb.com · +34 664 326 018