The Hotel Website RFP: What to Ask, What to Skip, and a Template That Works

A request for proposal can be a useful way to compare website agencies on equal terms, or a forty-page exercise that drives off the good ones and rewards whoever writes the smoothest boilerplate. This guide covers when an RFP is worth running and when it is not, the fourteen questions that actually predict a good build, the answers that should worry you, and a plain-language outline you can copy.

What an RFP is actually for

A request for proposal has one legitimate job: letting you compare a small number of capable agencies on the same questions, so the decision comes down to substance rather than whoever gave the smoothest demo. Used that way, it is a genuinely useful discipline. Used the way many are, as a long procurement document assembled from templates, it mostly filters for agencies that are good at answering RFPs, which is a different skill from building hotel websites that book rooms. The difference between those two outcomes lies almost entirely in what you ask and how much ceremony you wrap around the asking.

When an RFP helps

A formal RFP earns its overhead in a few specific situations:

• Your ownership group, board, or management company requires documented competitive bids before approving the spend.
• You are buying for several properties at once and need pricing that scales predictably across them.
• The project involves genuinely complex integrations, such as a property management system, a booking engine, a spa or activities system, and a loyalty program that all have to work together.
• You have been burned before and want every commitment in writing before you sign, particularly around ownership and support.

In these cases the document is doing real work. It creates a paper trail, forces bidders to commit to specifics they can be held to later, and gives you a defensible basis for the decision if anyone above you asks why the contract went where it did.

When it wastes everyone's time

For a single independent property with a straightforward scope, a formal RFP often subtracts value. The best small agencies tend to be busy, and many will quietly decline a twenty-page RFP from a forty-room hotel because the cost of responding properly is out of proportion to the project. What comes back instead are responses from firms with dedicated proposal writers, which tells you about their sales operation and nothing about their build quality. If you already know roughly who you want to work with, a better process is a short written brief, the same one-page question list sent to two or three shortlisted agencies, and a working call with each. You get the comparability an RFP promises without the ceremony that drives good builders away.

The fourteen questions that predict a good build

Whether you run a formal RFP or the lightweight version, these are the questions worth asking, grouped by theme. Fourteen is enough. Most questions you could add beyond these tend to produce boilerplate that reads identically from every bidder and separates nobody.

Ownership

• Will the domain, hosting, CMS, and analytics accounts be registered to our business from day one, with admin access in our hands?
• Once the project is paid for, do we own the design, code, content, and photography outright, and can we take all of it to another provider?
• If we leave you in three years, what does the exit look like, and what, specifically, would we lose?

Ownership answers predict more about the long-term relationship than anything else in the document. An agency that is comfortable being leavable is an agency you can safely stay with. Our agency-switching checklist is essentially a catalog of what happens when these questions get skipped at the start.

Booking engine integration

• How will the site connect to our existing booking engine and PMS, and have you integrated with these specific systems before?
• Will each room page deep-link into the booking engine with the room type and dates carried through, or does every booking path land the guest on a generic availability screen?

Ask each bidder to show you a live hotel site running on your booking engine. The handoff from website to booking engine is where direct bookings are won or lost, and an agency that has never touched your system will be learning on your budget.

Page speed

• What mobile page speed will you commit to, measured with what tool, and will that commitment appear in the contract?
• Who is responsible if performance degrades after launch, for example when new scripts or plugins get added?

A useful answer references a measurable public standard, such as Google's published Core Web Vitals thresholds, and names the tool used to verify against it. A sentence like "we build fast sites" is not a commitment. A number plus a measurement method is.

SEO migration

• Will you map every existing URL to its new equivalent and put 301 redirects in place before launch, and can we see the redirect map as a deliverable?
• Who monitors rankings and Search Console in the weeks after launch, and for how long?

Replacing a site without a redirect plan is how a hotel loses years of accumulated search visibility in a single deploy, and the damage surfaces after the invoice is paid. The redirect map should be a named deliverable with a named owner, not an assumed background task. Our hotel SEO service page outlines what a competent migration includes if this is unfamiliar territory.

Content and photography

• Who writes the website copy, what does it cost if you do, and exactly what do you need from us if we do?
• What photography does the quote assume exists, and what happens to timeline and budget if ours turns out not to be usable?

Content is the most common reason website projects stall. Agencies quote assuming the hotel will deliver copy and photos, hotels assume the agency handles it, and the build sits nearly finished for months while everyone waits. Getting this assignment in writing up front is worth more than most technical requirements on the list.

Post-launch support

• What exactly is included in monthly support, what counts as billable extra, and what are the response times for a site-down emergency versus a routine content edit?
• Who at your firm does the actual work on our account, and what happens when that person is out or leaves?

Support is where the relationship actually lives after launch, and it is the part most hotels discover they never priced.

Total cost of ownership

• What will this cost in total over three years: build, hosting, software licenses, support, and any per-booking or percentage fees?

The one-time build price is the number agencies lead with and the least useful number for comparison. A low build fee attached to a proprietary platform charge, a mandatory retainer, or a per-booking fee can cost more over three years than a higher flat build with inexpensive hosting. Require every bidder to present pricing in the same three-year format so the comparison is honest. Our guide to what a hotel website costs walks through the fee structures you are likely to see.

Red-flag answers

The point of sharp questions is that weak answers become informative. These are the ones that should slow you down:

• "The site will be built on our proprietary platform." Sometimes workable, but only if the bidder can say clearly what you can export and take with you when you leave. If the honest answer is nothing, the low build price is being subsidized by your future switching costs.
• Vague migration language such as "we handle SEO during the transition" with no mention of a URL map or 301 redirects. This is the most expensive corner an agency can quietly cut.
• "Unlimited revisions." It sounds generous and commits to nothing, because the real constraints were never the count of revisions but scope, timeline, and who has final say.
• No measurable speed commitment, or one measured only on desktop when most hotel traffic arrives on phones.
• Reluctance to name who will do the work, or signs that the impressive people in the sales call will not be the people on your project.
• A quote dramatically below the others. It usually means content, photography, redirects, or support has been silently excluded, and you will buy those pieces later at full price.

What to skip

Most RFP templates circulating in hospitality were inherited from corporate procurement and carry sections that add length without adding signal. You can safely cut agency history essays, biographies of every staff member, insurance boilerplate scaled for enterprise contracts, requests for five or more references, and any question whose answer would not actually change your decision. Above all, skip speculative design, meaning a request for free homepage mockups with the proposal. Strong agencies decline speculative work because thoughtful design depends on discovery they have not done yet, so the request filters your pool down to whoever is willing to guess prettily, which is the opposite of what you are hiring for.

A section-by-section outline you can copy

Here is a plain-language structure that fits on three or four pages. Write it in normal sentences rather than procurement language:

1. Your property in one paragraph. Room count, location, the kind of guest you serve, your current website URL, and the booking engine and PMS you run today. Bidders cannot scope accurately without this, and making them ask for it wastes a round of correspondence.
2. Why you are going to market. Two or three sentences on what is wrong with the current site or what has changed. A sentence like "our site is eight years old, slow on phones, and our OTA share keeps climbing" tells a bidder more than a page of formal objectives.
3. Scope of work. The pages you believe you need, including one page per room type, offers, dining, events if you host them, and a local area guide, plus anything unusual. Say explicitly what is out of scope.
4. Technical requirements. The booking engine and PMS the site must integrate with, accessibility expectations, mobile performance expectations, and any other systems in the picture, such as gift cards or a spa booking system.
5. Content and photography. State what usable copy and photography you already have, and ask bidders to quote both scenarios: they produce what is missing, or you do.
6. SEO migration. Require a full URL redirect map and a period of post-launch monitoring as named deliverables, and ask who owns each.
7. Ownership terms. State plainly that the domain, hosting, CMS, content, and analytics accounts must be registered to your business, and ask bidders to confirm or explain any deviation.
8. Support and maintenance. Ask what is included monthly, the rate for work beyond it, and response times for emergencies versus routine edits, all in writing.
9. Budget and pricing format. Give a realistic range and require pricing as an itemized three-year total cost of ownership. Hiding your budget does not produce sharper prices, it produces guesses and mismatched scopes.
10. Timeline. Any real deadline, such as a season opening, and your own availability for reviews and approvals, which is usually the actual bottleneck in a website project.
11. Logistics and evaluation. The proposal deadline, who receives questions, when answers will be shared with all bidders, and the criteria you will use to decide. Three weeks is a reasonable response window for a project of this size.

Running the process once responses arrive

Score the written responses against the fourteen questions, take the top two or three to a working call, and have each bidder walk you through a live site running on your booking engine, on a phone rather than a conference-room screen. Then call one reference hotel per finalist and ask a single question: tell me about a time something went wrong. Give real weight to the bidder that asked you sharp questions during the process, because an agency that interrogates your scope before quoting it is showing you how it will behave inside the project. And if you would rather start with a conversation than a document, our get started page is the short version of everything above.