A template is fine for a first site with few pages. It becomes expensive when you need a calendar, several languages or a distinct look: by the time you have bent the template into shape you have paid the difference twice.

Is there a monthly cost?

Domain and hosting, yes, and they are small. Beyond that it depends: a static site costs almost nothing to keep alive, while a booking engine or a PMS integration has its own monthly fee.

How long does it take?

Between two and six weeks for a small site, if the content exists. What stretches a project is almost never the code: it is waiting for photos and texts.

How much a hotel or villa website costs

What you pay for is not the design

The drawing is the visible part. Underneath there is the structure (which pages exist and in what order), the content, the photography and video, the languages, the calendar or booking engine, the speed on a phone, the search-engine work and the hosting.

Structure and content: what each page says and who writes it.
Photography and video: the single biggest difference between an expensive site and a cheap one.
Calendar, prices and requests: where the booking actually happens.
Languages: each one multiplies the text, the forms and the emails.
Speed and search: what decides whether anyone ever sees it.

What really makes it expensive

Producing content you do not have yet (a photo shoot, a drone flight, texts for thirty rooms), a booking engine with online payment, an integration with your PMS or channel manager, a catalogue with hundreds of items, and every extra language once you count the forms, the emails and the calendar.

Nine pages in three languages: what the Portobello Suites budget actually covered.

What can wait

Online payment, the blog, a management panel, the full set of languages. A site that shows availability and answers fast beats a perfect one that arrives next season. Start with what takes the booking; add the rest with the money it brings in.

How many bookings it takes to pay for itself

Take a hotel with twenty direct bookings a month at 150 dollars a night. What it saves in commission at 15% is about 450 dollars a month. A 2,500 dollar site is paid back in roughly six months, and from there on it is margin.

For a house that rents by the week the arithmetic is shorter: two or three direct bookings a season usually cover the whole site.

A catalogue with its own admin panel costs more than a page: Terrasol.

What to ask before you sign

Who owns the domain, the hosting and the code. What happens if you change supplier. How long it takes and what the deadline depends on. What maintenance includes and what it costs a year. Whether they measure speed on a phone. And whether you can update texts and photos yourself.

Ask to see two sites they built, live, on your own phone.
Ask for a fixed quote with what is in and what is out.
Ask who writes the texts: it is the work that gets forgotten and delays everything.