How OTA Builder works

There are four steps to how to create a travel booking website with OTA Builder: pick a name, let the site go live, set your markup, then share the link. No code, no technical team and no airline contracts of your own are involved.

This page walks through each step, then shows the same site from two sides: what your customer sees when they book, and what you see in your account. Everything here is included in the free plan, which is laid out on the pricing page.

Step 1: Pick a name

The first step is choosing what your travel business is called and what it looks like. You enter a brand name and pick your colors, and your whole site follows them.

Pick a name you can say out loud on a phone call and spell once. It goes on your site, on the hotel and activity vouchers your customers receive, and on the emails that arrive after a booking. If you already trade under a name, use that one.

Colors work the same way. Choose the ones you already use on your posts and your business card so people recognize the same business in two places.

Neither choice is permanent. You can change your brand name and your colors at any time, so a name you are only half sure about is not a reason to stop. Many people start with a working name and change it once the first bookings come in.

Nothing in this step is technical. There is no template to install, no theme to buy and no designer to brief. You are describing a business, not building a website, and the building part is not yours to do.

You also choose your web address. Every site gets a free subdomain on ota-sites.com, for example sunway-travel.ota-sites.com, and you can connect your own domain on the free plan. A free domain of your choice comes with the $99 per year bundle.

Step 2: Your site goes live

The second step happens on OTA Builder's side. Once you sign up, your site is live within one working day.

What goes live is a complete travel booking website, not a landing page with a form. The flight, hotel and activity search, the booking engine and the checkout are already built and connected to supply: 1,000+ airlines, 5,000,000+ hotels and properties and 2,500+ activities. You do not assemble any of it.

Activation time depends on your configuration. That is why this page does not print a number for it. What is fixed is the order: you sign up, the site is built for you, and then you are the one deciding how it earns.

Some things you never have to arrange. You do not rent a server, write code, hire a developer or sign your own contracts with airlines, hotel suppliers or activity providers. Flight tickets on your site are issued through OTA Builder's ticketing partner and follow each fare's rules, and hotel and activity bookings come from the same supply.

The customer-facing side runs in multiple languages and currencies, so a visitor who does not read English is not stuck. The full feature list per group sits on the features page.

A site on the free plan carries a small Built with OTA Builder line in the footer. That line is the only place your customers see the technology behind the site, and the $99 per year bundle removes it and adds a free domain of your choice and premium support.

Step 3: Set your markup

The third step is the one that makes the site a business. You decide how much you add on top of the prices your site shows, and that markup is yours to keep.

Markup is set separately for flights, for hotels and for activities. The three products behave differently, so most people do not use one number for all of them. You can be conservative on flights, where customers compare hardest, and less so on activities, where they rarely do.

A customer searches a return flight on your site. The fare found is $400, your flight markup adds $30, and the customer sees and pays $430. The $30 is yours.

Illustration only, not a typical result.

Set the markup too high and customers check elsewhere and leave. Set it at nothing and you have built a free search engine for strangers. The habit worth building is to change one number at a time and watch what happens to bookings over a few weeks. There is more on this in how travel agencies make money on flights, hotels and activities.

Because markup is set per product type, you can also treat the three as three small businesses. Flights bring people in and are compared hard. Hotels are booked with less shopping around. Activities are often added by someone who has already decided where they are going. Your numbers can reflect that instead of pretending the three behave alike.

You can change your markup whenever you want, so nothing you enter on the first day locks you in.

Step 4: Share and sell

The fourth step is telling people the site exists. Share your link on social media, on WhatsApp, or on your business card, and let people search for themselves.

A link does work that a chat message cannot. When someone asks you for a fare, you are answering one person, once, and you are copying prices by hand. When the same person opens your site, they search their own dates, see the price calendar, change the dates twice and book at midnight without you.

Put the link where people already talk to you: in your profile bio, in the group where friends ask about flights, in your email signature, on the card you hand out. If you sell mainly through social channels, selling travel on Instagram, TikTok and WhatsApp goes into the detail.

Offline still counts. A business card with your address on it works in a shop, at a wedding, at a school gate and in a taxi, and the person who types it in later lands on a site that sells, not on a form that promises a reply. If you already have customers who message you for quotes, sending them your link once is the simplest change you can make to your week.

Customers book and pay online on your site, and they receive their tickets and vouchers by email. You do not take card details over chat and you do not forward anything by hand.

What your customer sees

A customer on your site sees your brand, a search box and prices that already include your markup. They never see OTA Builder, other than the one line in the footer that the bundle removes.

Search

They open your address and search a flight, a hotel or an activity. Flights can be one way, return or multi city. Hotels can be a whole city or one named property. Activities are searched by destination.

Results

Flight results start arriving within seconds, with duplicate offers removed. Customers filter by airline, stops and departure time on each leg, and the price calendar shows the lowest fare found for each day. Where the source provides them, refund and change rules are shown in the results, and each offer carries a live countdown of how long the fare is held.

Hotel results show room size, bed types, photos and the full policies: check in window, children, pets, meals and deposits. Activity pages list the ticket types by age.

Checkout

The customer enters passenger details and pays at your checkout, on your site, at the price your markup produced. The booking is completed there rather than passed to another brand's page.

Language and currency

Your site's customer-facing side runs in multiple languages and currencies. Someone who prefers to read and pay in their own terms can do that without asking you for a translation or a conversion.

The email afterwards

Flights come back as ordinary airline e-tickets, issued through OTA Builder's ticketing partner and following each fare's rules. The PNR is in the passenger's own name, so they can check the booking on the airline's own website. Hotel and activity bookings send a voucher by email carrying your site's name.

What you see

Your side of the same site is deliberately small. Your account shows your markup settings and your bookings, and that is what you work with day to day.

Markup settings

Your markup settings hold what you add on flights, on hotels and on activities. Change a number there and your site prices follow it, without touching anything a customer sees directly.

Bookings

Your bookings show what has actually sold on your site. That is how you find out which of the three products your audience buys and where a markup change helped or hurt.

What you do not have to do is as important. You are not issuing tickets by hand, not chasing confirmations, not copying fares into messages and not building anything. If something does need a person, contact replies come within two working days, and bundle holders get premium support.

Between those two screens is the whole running of the business. If you want to see how this compares with affiliate links, a general website builder or paid travel software, read the comparison page, and if you are ready to try it, create your site or start with how to start an online travel agency for free.