A hotel website in Florence: direct booking and two languages

A hotel in Florence sells in English before Italian, so the site starts from the booking flow, not the home page. Dates, room and rate in three screens, with the city tax already inside the total: guests should not have to call to learn what they pay.

Florence has 360,930 residents in 2023 within the municipality (data from Wikidata Q2044, Città metropolitana di Firenze, Tuscany), but residents are not the hotel's guests. The page on websites in Florence explains why a city of this size works in two languages; here the question is narrower: how many steps does it take to book a room in English.

The booking flow in English

Three screens is the practical limit: someone booking on a phone during a trip gives up at the fourth step. The nightly price must appear in the calendar itself, because a guest looking for a weekend wants the figure before picking a date.

What to translate and what to leave alone

• Everything about money and rules: rates, city tax, cancellation, deposit.
• Room pages, with the room type name identical in both languages.
• The confirmation email and the payment error page.
• Do not translate place names: «Ponte Vecchio» stays «Ponte Vecchio».
• Dates follow each language format, but the price stays the same number.

Matching prices and city tax inside the total

Rate parity is a clause in the OTA contract, not a website choice: read it before publishing a price. The municipal city tax appears in the total on the first screen, not added at reception, otherwise the final figure looks like a mistake. The rules for two languages with separate URLs are in multilingual SEO.

Structured data: Hotel, HotelRoom and Offer

The JSON-LD block with type Hotel states address, phone, check-in and check-out through openingHoursSpecification, and facilities through amenityFeature. Each room is a HotelRoom with occupancy and bed type; the rate is an Offer with price, currency and validity. Do not expect a special box: this data helps the engine understand the property and its rooms. The method is in how to add schema markup.

# la pagina di prenotazione inglese risponde e dichiara le lingue
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} %{time_total}s\n" https://www.esempio-hotel.it/en/book
curl -s https://www.esempio-hotel.it/en/book | grep -o 'hreflang="[^"]*"' | sort -u

# quante pagine camera sono indicizzate
curl -s https://www.esempio-hotel.it/sitemap.xml | grep -c "/rooms/"

Blocks from the catalogue

Three records worth opening. Gallery Grid with Lightbox is the filterable gallery with a lightbox for room photos, with the publisher's declared licence to check on the block. Hero 12 is the full-bleed image opener, to use with a real photo of the facade. Contact 01 is the short form for groups and requests outside the calendar.

The limitation

The catalogue holds React and Tailwind components: there is no booking engine, no channel manager, no rate sync with the OTAs. The blocks cover the interface; availability and prices come from the hotel's property management system. On WordPress these blocks do not install as they are, and work as a structural reference.

Cost and timing

A hotel site with direct booking sits in the low thousands of euro when photos, copy and rates arrive ready; with a photo shoot, two languages and a property management integration the bill rises. The recurring cost is rate maintenance: if every price change needs a quote, the site falls behind the OTAs. The national picture is in what a website costs.

For the technical side read WordPress, Wix or React components, for the template choice how to choose a template, for the city picture websites in Florence. The full industry guide is a hotel website.