Home Farm Steading — Direct Booking Holiday Cottage Website

For any holiday let owner, the maths of the major booking platforms is hard to ignore. Airbnb and Booking.com between them can take anywhere from 15 to 25 percent of every reservation — a significant slice of income, on every single booking, year after year. The team behind Home Farm Steading understood this, and came to us wanting a better way.

The Brief

Home Farm Steading is a welcoming rural retreat set just outside Auchterarder in the heart of Perthshire — ideally placed for guests exploring the Highlands, playing world-class golf at Gleneagles, or using it as a base to reach Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, and Stirling. The property is beautiful, the location is genuinely hard to fault, and the owners had no shortage of interest from guests. What they wanted was a website that let them capitalise on that interest directly, capturing bookings without handing commission to a third party every time.

What We Built

The site needed to do two things well: showcase the property compellingly, and make booking feel simple and trustworthy.

For the showcase, we focused on putting the cottage and its surroundings front and centre. The design is clean and image-led — letting the Perthshire countryside speak for itself rather than competing with it. The site walks visitors through everything the property offers: the four beds, the layout, the peaceful rural setting, and the convenience of its location for guests with different itineraries — golfers, hill walkers, city breakers, or families after a quiet week away.

For the booking side, we integrated Free to Book — a purpose-built holiday letting platform that handles availability, reservations, and payments without charging commission on each booking. Guests can check availability and confirm a reservation directly on the site, in the same journey they’d expect from any major platform, but the money flows straight to the owner. No percentage skimmed off the top, no platform dependency, no terms dictated by a marketplace the owner doesn’t control.

The Result

Home Farm Steading now has a direct booking channel that works for them, not against them. Every reservation made through the website represents income the owner keeps in full — and over a full season of bookings, that difference is substantial.

The website also gives the property something the major platforms can’t: a space that’s entirely theirs. No competing listings alongside it, no algorithm deciding how prominently it appears, no reviews displayed out of context. Just a clean, considered site that presents the cottage on its own terms and gives guests every reason to book direct.

It’s a project that illustrates something we believe in: a well-built website isn’t a cost — it pays for itself.