Services · Ecommerce development · Hotel booking sites
Codeeo provides hotel booking website development Edinburgh hoteliers rely on to take reservations and payment on their own site. Room search, festival stay rules, deposits and refunds run through one booking engine that adds the city's 5% visitor levy to the total, stops charging it after the fifth consecutive night, and reports it separately for your returns. It fits New Town townhouses, Old Town boutique hotels, larger properties around Haymarket and guest houses in Leith and Stockbridge.
Edinburgh runs on two very different calendars: an August and a Hogmanay when every room sells months ahead, and quieter weeks when a direct booking is worth winning. A good booking site handles both without manual workarounds. It should also make winter breaks easy to sell.
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What the booking engine covers
Since 24 July 2026, overnight stays in Edinburgh carry a visitor levy of 5% of the accommodation cost, capped at five consecutive nights. It also applies to stays from that date that were booked and paid for, in full or in part, from 1 October 2025. For a booking site, that changes how prices are calculated, displayed, invoiced and reported. A third party widget that treats the levy as an afterthought can show one price on the search page and a higher one at checkout, which is exactly what UK drip pricing rules prohibit.
We build the levy into the pricing logic itself, alongside room rates, festival minimum stays and deposit rules. The guest sees the true total before paying, the invoice shows the levy as its own line, and your finance team can pull a report for each return period. Good hotel online booking system development Edinburgh operators can rely on starts there. Everything else on the site, from room pages to cancellation terms, is planned around how Edinburgh hotels actually trade.
The engine calculates the 5% levy on the accommodation element only, so breakfast or parking sold as extras are kept apart when they are priced separately. It applies the five night cap automatically for longer stays and shows the levy as a clear line in the summary, the confirmation and the invoice.
The correct levy on every booking, without manual edits.
Minimum stays, closed arrival days and non-refundable rates for August and the New Year period, set once in the admin and applied across the dates you choose. Outside those weeks, flexible rates and shorter stays return without anyone editing the site.
Peak dates sold on your terms, quiet dates kept open.
Festival bookings made many months ahead can take a deposit now and the balance on a date you set before arrival, with an automatic reminder and a secure link to pay. If the balance fails, your team is alerted early enough to resell the room.
Cash flow protected on long lead bookings.
Hotel booking website design Edinburgh guests can trust about stairs, lifts, room sizes and views. Georgian and tenement buildings rarely have identical rooms, so each page carries its own photos, floor level, step free access notes and whether the window faces the castle or the courtyard.
Fewer complaints on arrival, fewer room changes.
If you also sell serviced flats or self-catering units, each listing can show its Scottish short-term let licence number and any conditions you need guests to accept, such as occupancy limits or quiet hours, before they pay.
Licensed units sold alongside hotel rooms, correctly labelled.
Confirmation emails and the booking page carry directions from Edinburgh Waverley, Haymarket station and the tram from the airport, plus notes about steep closes, cobbles and luggage. Guests arriving late can choose a self check-in option at the point of booking.
Guests reach the door without phoning reception.
Hotel online payment integration Edinburgh guests from abroad and from across the UK can use: international cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay, and pay by bank through Open Banking where your provider supports it. Strong Customer Authentication runs inside checkout.
More payment choices, fewer failed transactions.
Reports by stay date and by booking date, showing room revenue, levy collected, refunds and levy reversed on cancellations. Your accountant exports what they need for each return without rebuilding figures from the PMS by hand.
Levy returns prepared from clean data.
Pre-arrival forms collect the name and nationality of every guest aged 16 or over, and passport details for overseas guests, as UK hotel records rules require. The data goes to the PMS and is kept no longer than your retention policy allows.
A complete register with less queueing at the desk.
Many visitors come back to Edinburgh every August or every Hogmanay. Returning guests can sign in with an emailed link, see their past stays and book the same room type at a direct rate before it reaches the portals. You decide how early that window opens and which rooms are included.
Loyal festival guests rebook with you, not with a portal.
Who this is for
Accommodation in Edinburgh ranges from a six room guest house in Leith to a large hotel beside the West End conference district. The levy and the festival calendar affect all of them, but the booking site each one needs looks different. These are the cases we plan for most often, with the booking features that matter in each. Some operators fit more than one.
In Leith, Newington or Bruntsfield, owners often do reservations, breakfast and accounts themselves. They need a booking engine that runs without supervision: stock synced with the channel manager, levy calculated without thought, deposits chased automatically, and an admin view simple enough to use on a phone between guests. We keep the setup lean so there is little to maintain. Owners can still pause a date or close a room in seconds when a family matter or a repair comes up.
Simple to run is the main requirement.
Character properties near the Royal Mile, Grassmarket or George Street sell atmosphere, and guests pay for a particular room rather than a room type. The site sells named or categorised rooms with their own pictures, packages such as whisky tastings or dinner, and gift vouchers. Returning festival guests can be recognised and offered their usual room before it goes on general sale. Where a room sits up several flights of a listed stair, the booking page says so plainly, and guests who need step free access are steered to the rooms that suit them.
Bigger properties close to the Edinburgh International Conference Centre handle conference delegates, corporate accounts and coach groups as well as leisure guests. The booking site needs delegate booking links with their own rates and release dates, company invoicing and a fast flow for single night business stays, all reporting levy correctly per booking. When a delegate stays beyond five nights, the levy cap applies to their booking automatically, which matters for long conferences and contractor stays.
Some operators run a hotel alongside serviced apartments across the city. One engine can sell both, with different deposit, cleaning and house rule settings per unit type, licence numbers shown where needed, and the levy applied to every overnight stay whichever kind of accommodation it is.
One checkout for every type of stay.
How we work together
Codeeo has no office in Edinburgh or anywhere in the UK. Our team of 80+ is based in Dubai, Riyadh and Karachi, and we work with Scottish hotels remotely, with discovery, reviews and staff training held by video call. Hotels usually start with a fixed scope build and keep a monthly support arrangement for rate changes, new packages and levy updates. Across 200+ delivered projects in the UAE and the US, clients rate us 4.7 from 23 Google reviews. Every project starts with a written scope and a named project lead who stays with you until after launch.
A defined build with a deadline
We agree what the product has to do, write it down with a price and a date, and build exactly that. Changes are priced before they are made, not discovered on the invoice.
A product that keeps evolving
Named engineers who work your hours, join your standups and stay on the codebase. You direct the backlog; we own the quality of what ships.
Something live that needs looking after
A monthly block of hours for improvements, fixes and the small requests that otherwise wait months. Unused hours carry for a quarter.
Technology
We build on Next.js or WordPress for the public site, connected through APIs to your PMS, channel manager and payment provider. The levy and pricing logic sits in one place, so if the council changes the rate or the rules, it is a configuration change rather than a rebuild. Card details stay inside your payment provider's secure fields at all times.
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As part of the price, calculated automatically on every booking.
The levy is 5% of the accommodation cost for each night up to five consecutive nights. The engine works out which part of the booking is accommodation, applies the rate, stops after the fifth night and includes it in the total from the first price the guest sees. It appears as a separate line on the confirmation and invoice, and cancellations reverse it alongside the refund so your figures match. If the council later adjusts the rate or the exemptions, your team updates one setting rather than every rate plan.
Schedule a free consultation and get a written recommendation, with costs, before you commit to anything.
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