An in-house web person gives you daily responsiveness and property knowledge, at the cost of a salary and a single point of failure. An agency gives you hotel specific experience across many properties and continuity, at the cost of slower small changes and coordination. Single properties usually do better with an agency plus internal ownership of content, and groups reach the point where an internal team pays for itself.
Small changes, made today. A price correction, a new photo, a closed date on the offers page. Through an agency these become a ticket and a wait, and the accumulated delay across a year is where internal teams justify themselves.
They also know the property. Someone who walks the building writes better room descriptions than someone working from a brief, and that shows in the pages that carry booking traffic.
Experience across many hotels. An agency has seen what happens to conversion when the booking engine is embedded rather than linked, on dozens of properties. One internal person learns that from your traffic alone, which is a slower and more expensive education.
Continuity is the other advantage. An agency does not resign in August. When your only internal web person leaves, the site freezes until someone is hired and learns the stack, and hotel websites degrade quickly when unattended.
Skip the research, talk to someone who has done it 45 minutes with an independent specialist. Free for hotels, no pitch, no commissions. Book a free session →A salary is compared against an agency retainer, and the salary usually looks worse. But an internal person also does the content, the photography coordination, the campaign landing pages and the analytics, work that an agency bills separately.
Compare total scope rather than headline cost. For a single property, the internal role is rarely full time, which is why it ends up attached to a marketing or reception job and done at the edges of the day.
Keep ownership internal: the domain, the hosting, the analytics, the content calendar and the decisions. Use an agency for build, technical maintenance and paid channels. This gives you speed where speed matters and expertise where it is expensive to develop.
Whichever model you pick, confirm ownership of every account in writing at the start. That single step is what makes the model reversible when circumstances change, and it costs nothing on day one. A development partner that resists it has answered a different question.
Usually at group scale, when the same work repeats across properties and one person can serve several sites. For a single independent, the role rarely fills a week, which is why it tends to be part of another job and gets squeezed out during busy periods.
Only if you own the domain, the hosting account and the code, and if the site is not locked to a proprietary platform. Confirm all of that before signing, because it is the difference between changing supplier and rebuilding.
Someone who knows the property, which usually means internal, with editing support if needed. Agency written room descriptions are competent and generic, and generic is what search engines and guests already have plenty of.
The accounts and the data: domain, hosting, analytics, search console and the ad accounts. Everything else can be outsourced and brought back. Those cannot, once they sit in someone else's name.
Content updates, offer pages, photography coordination, analytics review and coordination with the booking engine and marketing suppliers. At a single property that rarely fills a week, which is why it is usually part of a wider marketing role.
Confirm access to the domain, hosting and code first, take a full backup, and keep the old supplier engaged until the new one has served the site successfully for a week. Do not schedule it during a booking period that matters.