Are you a broker, hotelier or landlord running your website on WordPress? Looking to maintain better profitability or just want to switch the software? I daresay you’ll find a couple of good directions in this round-up!
We’ve carried out research to help you find plugins for managing your business operations on the WordPress website better at different dimensions: increase direct bookings through the property reservation system, boost your website visibility in search engines, improve pre-vacation guest experiences, perform better on mobile devices, integrate all sorts of external software, wire up IDX listing support, sync availability calendars to OTAs, etc.
We have a useful plugin for each of these needs! Moreover, we’ll be talking about them in the context of lodging and real estate marketplace businesses to help you see their benefits.
One way or another, these micro-niche and multipurpose WordPress plugins for hotels and property managers are aimed at growing your client base and offering a better service.
Let’s get going.
Set up optional booking/e-commerce tools
WordPress Booking Plugin by MotoPress
If you run a small hotel or rental property website, MotoPress WordPress Hotel Booking is a Gutenberg-ready tool that will take you forward. It’s bundled with the fully-featured toolkit for reservations and admin-submitted properties. The plugin is a perfect match if you are just starting out or want to switch the software.
The plugin’s toolkit lets you build a directory of properties with all their essential details like amenities, images, bed types, etc. and display a quick-and-easy property booking form. All sorts of seasonal prices and rates, online website bookings through different payment gateways and more can be set via a flexible plugin system (WooCommerce integration is provided via a premium add-on).
If you plan to create a massive directory of rental properties, you can also add the property finder form that will search through all rentals using traditional arrival / departure and the number of adults / children fields. Since there is a collection of professional WordPress themes designed with this plugin from the outset, you won’t have any problems with keeping design consistency.
Although direct website bookings can help you reduce dependency on OTAs, this plugin gives you a choice – you can optionally use a built-in availability calendars sync feature. This basically provides you with a free tool to wire up your website to external OTAs and sync bookings in real time. Additionally, you can optimize your workflow with the following useful extensions:
- Hotel Booking Payment Request add-on is a must-have automation feature that enables your guests to secure their bookings before arrival. You can employ it to send automated payment request emails in the preferable time frame before check-in. It allows guests to pay safely through the website, get their bookings confirmed and wait for a vacation with peace of mind.
- Hotel Booking Site Reviews automatically adds a five-star rating system and a review form to your properties to collect feedback from past guests. This is a fantastic tool to build trust with prospective guests and influence their decision to choose your property.
Get started with WordPress Booking Plugin by MotoPress
IMPress Listings
This free plugin is suitable for real estate managers who need to create a listing management system on WordPress. It’s going to be equally suitable for properties for rent and sale in different locations.
Using a variety of property fields, you can showcase a property price, country, address, MLS number, size, the number and types of rooms, a photo and video gallery and all sorts of other essentials to sell and rent out properties effectively.
Shipped with the user-oriented front-end listing inventory, easy-to-handle taxonomies for categorization, automatically embeddable maps, the plugin allows you to build a full-scale WordPress property management website.
The IMPress Listings plugin also offers unique integrations for IDX brokers – MLS integration through the medium of the IMPress for IDX Broker free plugin. This means you can automatically import major listing details, without a need to handle repetitive tasks.
As to inquiries, the plugin comes with a simple contact form. If you are looking for more automation, however, you might need to integrate third-party booking plugins.
Get started with IMPress Listings
WooCommerce
The WooCommerce WordPress plugin needs no introduction – it’s one of the top-rated and used plugins for ecommerce needs, including bookings.
There are multiple ways you can use this plugin on your hospitality website: create an on-site shop to sell extras and equipment if you are in the lodging business, rent out bookable units like apartments or boats, wire up conversion-oriented tools like a discount system with multiple dependencies, and, of course, enable more region-specific payment gateways for online payments.
In broad strokes, you can use this plugin separately from your current property management and a WordPress booking system, or even run the whole PMS system completely on WooCommerce.
Moreover, many directory and booking plugins provide built-in integration with WooCommerce, which means you can connect even more handy tools that bring more value to your business. For example, you can make use of numerous add-ons, both WooCommerce native solutions and third-party ones:
- WooCommerce Bookings (official) is used by several WordPress rental property theme providers for implementing a rental unit booking system (date and time-wise).
- WooCommerce Account Funds (official) extension allows you to build a long-term guest loyalty by providing clients with rewards, such as exclusive discounts that can be accumulated as account funds and then spent on your website.
- WooCommerce Product Table (third-party) is a great product comparison visualisation tool based on WooCommerce, so you can use it to highlight key benefits of extra services or packages you offer.
Easy Property Listings
This is another great solution for a real estate WordPress marketplace. With this plugin, you can enable multiple agents to show their properties featuring home location, amenities, types, size, floor plans and other common details. Google Maps and video embeds can be placed without any problems or third-party plugins.
The plugin allows to display listings in a list or grid layout and, unlike many other similar plugins, it comes with an advanced design and customization toolkit to help you keep visual consistency with your WordPress theme.
With a pack of extra shortcodes and widgets, you can modify behavior of your listing presentation and property search on your real estate website. Geolocation and iCal appointment support are bundled with the core plugin.
Admin property managers can sort and delete listings as well as assign landlords and sellers to chosen properties. All extra CRM features, such as automatic email alerts and follow-up emails and performance reporting tools can be set up.
The core plugin is free, but you may want to add even more useful functionality with all sorts of add-ons, such as Testimonial manager or Frontend submission.
Get started with Easy Property Listings
Enhance your SEO efforts and website performance
Yoast WordPress SEO
The hospitality industry is saturated, especially in tourist hubs. Your website visibility in search engines directly depends on how good your local SEO is. There are tons of the best practices you might find across the net, but in any case, one of the most used go-to WordPress SEO tools is always the Yoast plugin.
It will assist you through the content optimization process by providing automatic feedback on whether you are doing the SEO correctly. For example, it’ll help you properly perform the keyword optimization for the front page, optimize your blog posts, set up efficient URLs, optimize images and more.
Overall, this free SEO plugin will be a great help for so crucial on-page optimization, which is a nice solution to move things forward without a need to figure out SEO basics for weeks.
An alternative to Yoast SEO is RankMath, a newer plugin from MyThemeShop that has been making waves.
WP Google My Business Auto Publish
To help search engines know about your hospitality business website and present its details in a categorized way, you should register your Google My Business account. It’ll allow your business information to appear in Google.com, Google Maps, and Google Earth.
It won’t just put your website in front of a prospect’s eyes, it’ll also allow you to add your own URLs for specific actions, such “book a room”, “search the best rate” or whatever applies to the realities of your business.
This free Google My Business integration plugin will handle automatic publishing of your posts, custom posts and pages from WordPress to your Google My Business page.
Since it’s powered by the official Google My Business API, your post featured images, call-to-action buttons, ratings, reviews and other important information can be automatically added right into your official GMP. It is implemented within minutes, but the result can be a pleasant surprise!
Get started with WP Google My Business Auto Publish
WordPress AMP
AMP is an acronym for Accelerated Mobile Pages, which is a Google’s project for mobile-first web. AMP-enabled websites load in a blink of an eye, therefore, provide huge value to the overall website performance and SEO. If you haven’t given a try this technology yet, you risk to pull up the rear in your local SEO competition.
When it comes to the hospitality business, what can this plugin yield? At the very least, you can improve your travel blog visibility, boost overall traffic, provide prospects with a better website surfing experience, improve the shopping experience if you use WooCommerce, etc. You can select what website pages need to be AMP-enabled and opt out of it for the chosen pages and posts.
The plugin gives you full control over design (button and heading colors, fonts, images, ads, etc.) to help you reach visual parity between AMP and normal desktop or mobile website design.
Thanks to the integration with analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Google Tag Manager and others, you can measure whether AMP brings any traffic and conversions.
Get started with the WordPress AMP from MotoPress
Improve user experiences
Google Language Translator
The best way to reach and serve foreign audiences is a multilingual website, when each localized version is professionally polished. And I’m pretty sure hospitality business websites deal with foreign travelers on a regular basis.
To create a proper multilingual website, you can go with a trusted standby – WPML. Opting for this WordPress multilingual plugin, you’ll face no limitations in functionality and support. Among other great alternatives that offer different features and pricing tags, we recommend Weglot and TranslatePress. If you are looking for a decent free alternative, Polylang will be a great fit.
However, translation into different languages might take a significant amount of time and resources.
As a temporary turnaround, you can simply integrate the machine translation by the Google Translate software – and translate your website content without leaving a dashboard with this great plugin. Travelers will be able to select their languages with the language switcher on your website. As far as I know, many website owners in the hospitality sector employ this plugin.
The plugin works for posts, pages and widgets. You may also optionally hide Google branding.
Get started with the Google Language Translator
Call Now Button
No matter whether you provide automatic online booking services on your lodging WordPress website or not, there are always guests who need more personal touch and want to call your establishment! And this awesome plugin is going to improve the user experience on your website in this regard.
The plugin basically adds a simple click-to-call button to your website displayed on mobile devices – so that travelers can quickly locate it and make a call in a single click. Especially those people who live on a shuttle ride between airports and nearby taxis will be really grateful for this experience!
As for customization options, the plugin is a breeze to set up: you need to simply enter your phone number, add texts, choose a button color, select its position and optionally designate advanced settings.
Get started with the Call Now Button
iPanorama 360
This plugin is particularly good at providing a high-touch pre-vacation experience for your guests. Along with images and videos, 360 VR-tours through the interior and exterior of your rental properties is another trendsetting way to present your rental units. It won’t take much time to add them to posts and pages where you showcase property images.
To make a VR-tour even more interactive and informative for prospective guests or property buyers, you can add hotspots, popovers, thumbnails and compass over the images.
The plugin works with all major browsers and its content looks awesome on mobile devices.
Get started with iPanorama 360
Instagram Feed
Jaw-drapping Instagram images are a real lure for travellers. Just post aspiration types of imagery of your vacation rental and location via Instagram, then employ this plugin to get them synced to your WordPress website and voila! You have new fans – first on the websites, then in social media, and finally – in reality.
This Instagram feed WordPress plugin is completely customizable, so you should not run into issues with creating a photo gallery based on your Instagram updates. You can modify the width and height of your gallery, the number of columns, background colors, spacing, feature full-size photos and even display photos from several Instagram accounts.
Get started with Instagram Feed
Geotargeting WP
Geotargeting is particularly helpful for real estate marketplaces – it’s an effective way to market properties based on a prospect’s location. Some decent plugins include it out of the box, but if your WordPress PMS lacks it, this popular plugin can come in handy.
Being based on IP’s databases, it’ll help you accurately target the needed locations to serve prospects spot-on property information. Using this plugin, you can create the needed regions, connect multiple services and run highly targeted ads.
Get started with Geotargeting WP
Employ effective specialist tools
Cookie Notice for GDPR
If you use cookies and online tracking of visitors from the EU, it automatically means you can collect sensitive user data – and users need to know about that!
This lightweight yet useful plugin is designed for one important purpose: to help you notify users that your website uses cookies. This is required in order to comply with the EU cookie law in accordance with the GDPR regulations.
The plugin is easy to set up and customize: you are free to customize cookies messages, place a link to the page with more information, sync it with your privacy policy page, modify cookies behavior and make use of other related features.
Get started with Cookie Notice for GDPR
Tour Master
This plugin is sharpened for a specific need – to help you sell tours, packages, excursions you might offer along with lodgings. It’s packed with all sorts of tools for smooth tour setup and management: feature flexible offers with the booking form, designate variable pricing, set up recurring tours, add custom packages for each tour, send auto reminders and group messages, etc.
There is much more to the plugin, so if you are looking for this particular functionality, it should fully satisfy your needs.
Another alternative plugin I believe is worth checking out is WooTour – it’s based on WooCommerce, therefore, you can think of multiple ways to take advantage of this integration.
VR Calendar Sync Pro
Do you list your property on the OTAs like Airbnb or HomeAway? Did you know that you can easily sync availability calendars of your property on the external marketplaces with your WordPress website listings?
VR Calendar Sync Pro is one of that solutions that can establish this automatic connection. Such a plugin will be of use for those of you who already have an up-and-running website and looking to embed calendars that can show available and unavailable days in real time (with optional bookings software).
It runs thanks to the iCal event data exchanging file format so that you can set everything up by simply importing and exporting availability URLs of your properties. Don’t worry about double bookings, this is going to be an automatic two-way availability synchronization for your bookable spaces.
Get started with VR Calendar Sync Pro
Wrapping everything up
You are going to be better off when you start implementing some of these plugins on your WordPress hotel booking or real estate website. Your task is to figure out in which areas your website needs improving and then choose the appropraite plugins.
Do you use any of these on your WordPress site? Do you have any other recommendation for our collection? Let us know in the comments below.
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