Website · Bookings · Search · Photography
Kahana Baler
A boutique surf bed & breakfast in Baler, Aurora: built, photographed, and kept findable, end to end.
The brief
Kahana came to me needing a website that could do more than describe the place: it needed to take the booking itself. Most of what a small B&B in Baler earns online was disappearing into Agoda and Airbnb commissions, fifteen to twenty per cent a booking, with almost nothing to show for a guest who had, in truth, already decided to stay there.
The work was to build a site that could stand on its own: handle a booking and a payment directly, be found by people who had never heard of Kahana before, and carry photography that did the place justice.
What it’s done
Since the first booking came through last December, the site has quietly taken ₱441,700 across fifty-two room bookings, and not one peso of it carried a platform commission.
52
Direct bookings, zero platform commission
₱8,494
Average booking value
105×
Return against the site’s yearly running cost
#1
Google ranking for every branded search
Being found
I fitted proper visitor tracking in mid-March. Since then the site has appeared 51,095 times in Google’s results and been clicked 1,324 times, climbing steadily month over month through the rainy season rather than falling away with it.
One page carries most of that weight: a travel guide I wrote for the site, unconnected to any room or rate, aimed at someone who hasn’t yet chosen where to stay.
| How to Get to Baler from Manila (travel guide) | 828 clicks (63% of all Google traffic) |
| Homepage | 422 clicks |
| Yoga | 32 clicks |
| Stay / rooms | 10 clicks |
Guests searching Kahana by name find it first every time. Guests who had never heard the name find the travel guide first, and stay anyway.
Photography
Where it stands
The paid social spend Kahana was already running before I began brought more visits than everything else combined, and not a single booking from any of them; those visitors left within two seconds. Nearly all of the revenue instead comes from three quieter sources: people who came back, people who searched, and people who followed a single link on Instagram. That link, on its own, has brought in ₱40,000.
What’s next is simply more of what’s already working: more guides like the one that carries most of the search traffic now, fresher photography on the room pages that get the most attention before a booking, and a harder look at whether that ad spend should be doing something else entirely.