Stay by the Sea: a direct-booking site built to outrank OTAs for a 7-bed Blackpool apartment

The bottleneck

A premium seven-bed Blackpool seafront apartment was paying 15–20% commission per booking to Airbnb and Booking.com. That works while inventory exposure matters, but compounds expensive at premium nightly rates — and concedes the customer relationship to the OTA platform.

Building direct demand means ranking for the high-intent local searches OTAs dominate: "group accommodation Blackpool", "family apartment Blackpool", "luxury beachfront Blackpool", "holiday apartment near Pleasure Beach". Then converting that traffic into bookings without the OTA layer — which means a booking flow as smooth as Airbnb\'s but with a price advantage.

What I built

A bespoke Next.js site engineered around two principles:

• Per-intent landing pages. Each high-intent buyer segment gets its own URL with tuned headline, copy, metadata, and imagery: /blackpool-group-accommodation, /family-accommodation-blackpool, /blackpool-beachfront-accommodation, /blackpool-holiday-apartment-near-pleasure-beach, /luxury-blackpool-apartment-sleeps-14. Each ranks for its own query class without diluting the others.
• Direct-booking incentive. Every page surfaces a 10% direct-booking discount vs. OTA price. The page reframes the visitor\'s choice as "pay less here or pay more there" — competitive on price, not just on brand.
• Trust + content layers. A blog, a Blackpool attractions guide, guest info pages, reviews, and structured data describing the property at a level OTAs can\'t match (because OTAs use template content).
• Booking flow. Direct booking + admin tooling under the same roof. The relationship and the data are owned by the apartment, not by an OTA.

What changed

A direct-booking site competing with OTA listings on the same search results — but converting bookings without the 15–20% commission tax. The 10% direct-booking discount visible on every page reframes the choice on price terms; per-intent landing pages capture niche search demand the OTA listings can\'t target as cleanly.

Each direct booking that would have gone via an OTA now pays for itself, plus margin, plus reusable owned data (guest emails, review momentum, repeat-stay relationships) that OTAs would otherwise have intercepted.