The Sleeping Giant Hotel
Launching a hotel from nothing, and keeping the commission
A boutique hotel in Bannau Brycheiniog, alongside the award winning Penycae Inn, with its own micro zoo of meerkats, wallabies and exotic birds.
- keywords ranking, from zero
- 225keywords ranking, from zero
- for "sleeping giant" and brand terms
- #1for "sleeping giant" and brand terms
- organic visits per month
- ~759organic visits per month
- of bookings now come direct
- ~40%of bookings now come direct
The challenge
The problem
The Sleeping Giant is a beautiful boutique hotel in the Brecon Beacons, alongside the award winning Penycae Inn, complete with its own micro zoo of meerkats, wallabies and exotic birds. In real life it had everything going for it. Online, it had nothing at all.
No brand, no logo, no website, no guests. On top of that it faced the problem every independent hotelier knows too well: the big online travel agents take a commission out of every single room night. The hotel needed to launch from a standing start with an identity, a presence, and crucially a way to take bookings directly and keep more of every sale.
They needed a launch partner, not just a web designer.
The build
What we built
The booking system is the piece that pays for itself. It runs on the hotel's own domain, on Next.js and Supabase with Stripe taking payment, and syncs availability two ways with the channels they already use so a direct booking and an agent booking cannot collide.
Off the shelf systems do a job, but they come with trade offs the hotel did not want to live with. Building it in house meant no monthly platform fee and no commission skimmed off hard won direct bookings, a booking journey that stays on brand instead of bouncing guests to a generic third party page, and the guest relationship and data sitting with the hotel, which matters for repeat stays and for GDPR. It also fits their actual rooms, suites, packages and add ons rather than forcing them into a template.
- Direct booking on their own domain, with no commission per stay
- Two way calendar sync, so availability stays right across every channel
- Card payment taken up front, with instant confirmation by email
- Room selection with per night pricing and dog friendly options
- Guest data and the guest relationship owned by the hotel
- Doubles as a front of house view of who is arriving and leaving
How we did it
Our approach
We launched the hotel end to end, from the name above the door to the confirmation email in the guest's inbox.
Brand and logo
We created the hotel's entire visual identity from scratch, a look that matched the quality of the setting and the experience.
A website that sells the stay
A new WordPress and Elementor site showing off the rooms, the location and the micro zoo, designed to turn browsers into bookings.
A custom booking system
Rather than rent a platform, we built the hotel its own engine: Next.js, Tailwind and Supabase on Vercel, with Stripe payments and iCal channel sync.
SEO to get found
A search strategy to take a brand new domain and make it visible for the terms guests actually search, the hotel's own name and competitive location terms.
Direct booking lead generation
The whole setup is geared to drive direct bookings, so the hotel keeps more of every sale instead of losing it to commission.
What it looks like
The result
What changed
The hotel launched in January 2024 with a brand new domain and no history at all. It now ranks for 225 keywords and takes around 759 organic visits a month, sitting at number one for its own name and on page one for competitive terms like "luxury hotels brecon beacons". A backlink profile was built from scratch alongside it, 50 links from 29 referring domains.
Roughly 40% of bookings now come direct, which cuts the hotel's reliance on the online travel agents and saves in the region of £5,000 a year in commission. Every one of those is a booking the hotel keeps in full, and guests booking direct often pay less than they would through a platform.
The system has also quietly become the hotel's front of house tool. The team use it to see every booking in one place: who is arriving, who is checking out, and what the day ahead looks like. That was never the brief, and it is where a lot of the daily value has ended up.
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