What a hotel website costs in Greece: an honest breakdown of the price

What a hotel website costs in Greece, in 2025, is usually between €1,500 and €6,000 once for the build, plus €400 to €2,500 a year to keep it running. The range below that is real (a builder site you set up yourself) and so is the range above it (custom design, full photography, deep booking integration). But the number that decides whether the purchase was good is the annual one, not the build fee, and almost nobody quotes both in the same document.

I build sites for hotels, villas and rentals on Crete. Owners forward me quotes to sanity-check more often than they ask me to build. This is how I read them.

The price bands, plainly

These are the bands I see in quotes owners send me on Crete. Yours may differ; a supplier in Athens with a studio and three staff prices differently from a freelancer in Rethymno.

You build it yourself on a site builder: €0 to €500 to set up, €200 to €450 a year. Defensible for 3 to 6 keys if you enjoy the work.
Freelancer on a template: €700 to €2,000 one-off. Usually one language written properly and the rest translated thinly.
Small studio, multilingual, booking engine wired in, local SEO foundations: €2,500 to €7,000. This is where most 10 to 40 key properties land, and where Meraki sits.
Full brand, custom design, photography and copy included, PMS or channel integrations: €10,000 and up, sometimes far up.

What actually drives the number

Page count is the thing owners ask about and the thing that matters least. What costs money is the number of distinct layouts, the number of languages, and how deep the booking flow goes.

Layouts, not pages. A 40-page site built on six layouts is cheaper to make and cheaper to maintain than a nine-page site where every page is designed from scratch. If a quote is priced per page, ask how many layouts that is.
Languages. Each extra language adds roughly 15% to 25% to the content work at build, and then charges you again every single time you change a paragraph. Three languages means three edits, forever.
Depth of the booking flow. A button that opens your engine in a new tab is an afternoon. An availability calendar with live rates on the room pages is days of work and an ongoing dependency on someone else's API.
Photography. The largest silently missing line in most quotes. A day shoot on Crete with a photographer who has shot hotels before, edits included, is commonly quoted in the €500 to €1,200 range. If the quote does not mention photos, the photos are your problem in March.
Who writes the words. Copy written by someone who has read your last two hundred reviews costs real hours. Copy generated in ten minutes is free and reads like it.
Migration. If you already have a site with traffic, someone has to map the old URLs to the new ones. It is boring, it takes a few hours, and skipping it is how a redesign loses the search visibility the old site had earned.

One-off versus recurring: the lines that keep charging

Split every quote into two columns before you compare anything. One-off: design, build, copy, translation, photography, migration. Recurring: everything below.

Domain: €10 to €30 a year for a .gr or .com through an EETT-accredited registrar.
Hosting or platform: €60 to €400 a year depending on whether you are on shared hosting or a managed platform.
Booking engine: either a monthly fee or a percentage of each direct booking. Both models exist in Greece; check which one you are signing.
Channel manager, if you run OTAs: a monthly fee, usually scaled by room count.
Card payments, if you take deposits on your own site: a percentage per transaction plus a fixed fee, whether you use a Greek bank gateway or an international provider.
Consent tool, transactional email, maintenance or updates, and the seasonal content work: new rates, new dates, a new room type, this year's offers, in every language.

The two-April number

Here is the one habit that changes how you buy. The two-April number is every euro you will pay from the day you sign to the day your second season opens. Build, content, photography, all subscriptions for twenty-four months, and the changes you already know you will ask for.

Two Aprils, not one, because the first season is covered by goodwill. Small fixes are free, the developer still remembers the project, nobody has invoiced for a text change yet. The second April is when the real cost profile appears: the free tweaks have stopped, the person who built it has moved on, and a new room type means a quote.

A €1,800 build with €1,400 a year of subscriptions and €60 per text change has a bigger two-April number than a €4,000 build that runs on €500 a year and lets you edit your own rates. I have seen owners choose the first because they compared two headline figures.

Custody cost: the price of changing your own site

Custody cost is what it costs you, in money and in days, to make a change you will certainly need to make, plus whose name the keys are in. It is the part of a quote that is never written down and the part that hurts most in July.

Ask for it in writing before you sign: the fee per change after launch, the response time between June and September, and whether the domain and hosting accounts are registered in your business name with your email as the administrative contact. Every few months someone on Crete discovers their domain sits in a former developer's account and the developer is not answering. The domain costs €15 a year. Losing it costs a season.

The sites I get called in to fix are rarely badly built. They are out of date, because updating them required an email to someone who was busy.

The Greek line items most quotes leave out

ΦΠΑ. A Greek supplier adds 24% to the figure you were quoted unless it says otherwise. An EU supplier invoicing your VIES-registered ΑΦΜ issues without VAT under reverse charge and you account for it yourself. Two quotes are not comparable until both are net of VAT.
ΓΕΜΗ number in the footer. Under Ν. 4919/2022 companies must state their ΓΕΜΗ registration number on their website. It costs nothing to add and is routinely forgotten.
ΜΗ.Τ.Ε. number. Your tourism registry number belongs in the footer and near the booking call to action. It is required in advertising material, and a website is advertising material.
Cookie consent that actually blocks. A banner that loads analytics and pixels before the visitor clicks anything is decoration, not compliance. A tool that genuinely blocks scripts until consent costs €0 to €15 a month. Budget it as recurring.
Accessibility, if you are not a microenterprise. The European Accessibility Act, transposed in Greece by Ν. 4994/2022, applies from 28 June 2025 to consumer services including online sales flows. Microenterprises providing services (fewer than 10 people and turnover or balance sheet total up to €2 million) are exempt from the service obligations. A 40-key hotel with twelve staff is not automatically in that exemption, and retrofitting an inaccessible booking flow costs more than building it properly once.

A decision I made about photography, and why it changed our price

We used to fold photography into the build price because it made the quote look complete. It made the timeline dishonest. Three projects in a row stalled, not on design or code, but on waiting for a shoot day that kept moving because the rooms were occupied or the light was wrong or the owner wanted the new umbrellas in first.

Now photography is a separate line with its own date, and the site launches with the best images that exist today. We swap them later. That is why a seven-day build is a real promise rather than a slogan: we removed the one dependency we do not control.

If you take one thing from this: a quote with no photography line is not a cheaper site. It is the same site with a second invoice arriving in March.

Eight questions that make a quote comparable

Is this figure with or without ΦΠΑ?
In whose name are the domain and hosting accounts, and how do I move them if we part ways?
What does a text or photo change cost after launch, and what is your response time in July?
Which changes can I make myself without touching code?
Is translation priced per language or per page, and who does it?
Are photographs included, how many, and do I own the licence for OTAs and print?
List every recurring subscription, its annual cost, and whose name it is in.
What happens in year two: renewal fee, redesign fee, or nothing?

What I would actually spend, by property size

4 to 8 keys, villa or studios: €1,500 to €3,000 all in for the first year, with photography inside that number. Do not buy custom design at this size. Buy good photos, correct Greek and English, a fast site, and a clear way to enquire or book.
15 to 30 keys: €3,000 to €7,000 to build, €80 to €200 a month to run once the booking engine and channel manager are counted. Here the engine integration and multilingual content start to earn their cost.
40 keys and up, or several properties: custom is justified, but the cost is dominated by integrations and by who maintains them. Ask about the integration before you ask about the design.

The claim I will stand behind

For a property under ten keys on Crete, spending more than €8,000 on a website before spending on photography and on properly written English is a mistake. I have never seen the extra design budget pay for itself at that size, and I have seen weak photos hold back a perfectly good site every single season.

Work out your two-April number, ask for the custody cost in writing, and then compare. Two headline prices tell you almost nothing.