Alessio Golfetto

A direct-booking website for my own holiday let in Treviso

Role: owner, designer and developer
Scope: brand, UX, copy in English, Italian and German, WordPress build, SEO
Booking engine: Your.Rentals
Relaunched: autumn 2026 · casafiera.space

The problem

Casa Fiera is my two-bedroom apartment in Treviso, which I run as an Airbnb Superhost. The first version of the site, built in 2025, looked the part but worked like a brochure: a mood-led homepage, a gallery and a link out to book.

Then Airbnb announced it was moving hosts to a single 15.5% host-only fee, which means raising nightly rates by around 18% just to keep the same payout. The site needed to stop describing the apartment and start taking bookings.

What I changed

• The hero opens with the facts guests decide on. It leads with the listing itself (2 bedrooms, private parking, a 10-minute walk to the centre), with the 4.94 rating from 52 Airbnb reviews above it so trust carries over from Airbnb.
• A reason to book direct. A lower price than Airbnb and Booking.com, free cancellation up to 7 days, 10% off non-refundable, instant confirmation, and WhatsApp straight to me.
• Booking on the homepage. A Your.Rentals widget with live prices and availability sits directly under the pitch, and on mobile a sticky “Book direct” bar keeps it one tap away.
• Questions answered before they’re asked. A 12-question FAQ on parking, check-in, airports, remote work and cycling, written so Google and AI search can quote it.
• Content for what guests actually search for. New pages for Directions & Day Trips and Cycling Holidays in Veneto, plus a blog.
• Three languages. English and Italian written natively, plus German to match where guests come from.

The visual system

The refresh kept the logo, modelled on Treviso’s Torre Civica, and warmed everything around it. Headings are set in Cardo, a classical serif based on type printed in Venice in the 1490s, and body copy in Inter for readability at small sizes. Terracotta carries the section headings, and green is kept for actions, so the booking buttons are the strongest colour on the page.

The original moodboards, drawn from the Prosecco Hills and the Sile river, still set the tone.

Before and after

Result

• Relaunched in autumn 2026. Direct-booking figures will follow once there’s a full season to report.
• The baseline is encouraging. Over the previous 12 months, search engines were the site’s biggest source of traffic, and visitors clicked through to the booking engine 52 times against 18 times to Airbnb. Even the brochure version was sending people to book direct.
• Germany was the fourth-largest source of visitors after Italy, the UK and the US, which is why the site now has a full German version.
• It’s now the setup I build for other hosts. See what’s included.