WordPress.com Launches New Vertical And Theme For Hotels, Inns And B&Bs

WordPress.com now offers hotel, inn and bed and breakfast owners and managers the ability to showcase their properties with the help of a new responsive theme just for hotels. In addition, the service also today launched a special site dedicated to showing hotel owners how they can use the service to promote their properties.

For WordPress.com, adding this hotel vertical is part of a now-familiar pattern. Over the last few months, WordPress.com has been making a concerted effort to launch special verticals for businesses like restaurants and use cases like sites for schools and personal portfolios for photographers and designers. The emphasis here is clearly on showing how WordPress.com can be more than “just” a blogging tool and emphasizes the service’s overall content-management features.

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The new responsive theme is fully customizable and specifically geared toward hotels. It uses WordPress’ page template feature to allow owners to add the details about their rooms and amenities and also features a reservations widget that allows users to easily contact the owners with their travel plans. This widget, it is worth noting, does not allow users to directly book a room, however, and isn’t currently integrated with any payments solution.

Typically, WordPress uses these announcements to highlight some of its paid upgrades like custom domains, extra storage and custom design features. Most hotel and B&B owners probably don’t need these, so the company doesn’t highlight them in today’s release, but chances are, WordPress.com’s overall strategy of launching these verticals is mostly geared toward adding more professional users to the platform, given that they will also be more likely to pay for these upgrades.