Wix or your own website for your vacation rental? An honest comparison

"Should I build my vacation rental with Wix, or have my own website made instead?" — it's one of the most common questions in our initial consultations. The honest answer: it depends. On your budget, on how much you want to maintain yourself, and on how deeply the booking needs to be integrated.

There's no single right path, but three sensible ones — and just as many wrong reasons to pick one of them. Here we lay it out plainly.

The three paths at a glance

Vacation rental websites broadly fall into three categories:

• Smoobu builder — the website built into Smoobu. Fast, cheap, no external tools.
• Wix Studio — a flexible website editor, with booking usually embedded as a widget.
• Individual website by fewofy — your own design, connected to Smoobu: availability and booking come live from your Smoobu account.

Each path has a profile. Let's look at them one by one.

Smoobu builder: fast and cheap

If you already use Smoobu as your channel manager, the built-in website is the quickest start. You pick a template, add your content, and the booking sits inside from day one — availability and prices come straight from your Smoobu account.

Strengths: cheap, fast to launch, no second piece of software, booking cleanly integrated.

Limits: design is constrained, the templates look alike, and once you need multilingual content or a standalone brand presence you eventually hit a ceiling. For a single property that just needs to be solidly online, it's often plenty.

Wix Studio: flexibility you maintain yourself

Wix Studio is a full visual editor. You can shape layout, fonts, and images far more freely than in the builder, and you can maintain the site yourself without touching code. Booking is usually embedded as an iFrame booking widget — the availability calendar still lives in Smoobu but is displayed on your Wix page.

Strengths: plenty of design freedom, easy to maintain yourself, a large ecosystem of features.

Limits: the booking widget is an embedded block, not a seamless part of the page — its design and loading behaviour are set by the widget. Maintaining Wix yourself takes a little learning.

fewofy sets up Wix Studio with the Smoobu booking widget for you, as a certified Wix Partner via our partner agency Einblick Digital. It's the right path if flexibility and editing in the editor yourself matter more to you than the last second of load time.

Individual website: your own design, connected to Smoobu

We design our websites individually around your property: fast load times, clean code, and a direct Smoobu connection. Booking here isn't an embedded widget but a native part of the page — same design, same speed, one seamless flow for your guests.

Strengths: fully integrated direct booking, your own brand presence, up to five languages, an SEO foundation. You edit texts and images yourself in the fewofy portal; we take care of hosting and maintenance.

Limits: it costs more than a site builder — from €1,250 one-time plus €49 a month for care (excl. VAT). You change texts and images yourself; bigger layout changes go through us. Weigh it honestly.

Which path fits you?

A few questions that quickly bring clarity in practice:

• Tight budget, one property, online fast? Smoobu builder.
• You want to design and maintain it yourself, need flexibility? Wix Studio.
• Performance, your own brand, seamless direct booking, several languages? An individual website by fewofy.

Important: the most expensive solution isn't automatically the right one. Someone renting out a single apartment on the side rarely needs a custom build. Someone building a brand and betting on direct bookings, by contrast, quickly chafes against the limits of a builder.

Our recommendation

We'll tell you honestly which path fits your size — even if that's the Smoobu site builder. See what our individual website looks like, and our Smoobu page shows what we do for Smoobu hosts.

If you like, we'll look at your situation together in a free 15-minute intro call. We won't push anything on you that you don't need.