Three Airbnb listings became one booking page at aqua.mx, with the copy, photos and ratings read straight from the listings rather than retyped.
The request
An owner of three beachfront bungalows in Zihuatanejo wanted "a simple landing page and 3 url links." He had the property on Airbnb and no website. Asked what the business was, who the page was for, and whether he had a logo, he replied: "All yes."
That answer is the actual constraint. A busy owner will not write you a creative brief. The job is to need as little from him as possible.
What I did instead of asking again
He sent three Airbnb links. Everything the page needed was already inside them.
- Fetched each listing with a mobile user-agent. Airbnb server-renders a JSON blob into the HTML, so the title, description, capacity, rating, review count, and every photo URL come back from a plain request. No browser automation, no login, no scraping behind a wall.
- Pulled the real copy. "Oasis Bungalow is the largest of 3 completely private units at Aqua" is his sentence, not mine. Owners recognise their own words, which makes approval faster.
- Downloaded six photos per unit and reviewed them as a contact sheet rather than guessing from filenames. The hero I picked is the aerial where AQUA is painted on the building.
- Built one static page: a cinematic hero, an editorial section per bungalow with honest ratings, a location map, and a guest assistant that answers from the listing data and says "ask the owner" when it does not know. Mobile first, since it would be opened in a text thread.
- Deployed to GitHub Pages because it needed no interactive login, and the page was live minutes after the links arrived.
Live at aqua.mx
The client's domain was registered at GoDaddy, its DNS pointed at an unfinished Squarespace site, and his company email ran on the same domain through Google Workspace. Moving the site meant changing five records and touching none of the other thirteen: the MX records that carry his mail, and the TXT records that prove he owns the domain. The site went live on HTTPS the same evening. His email never dropped a message.
Why it is built this way
No framework. A one-page site with three outbound links does not need a build step, a CMS, or a JavaScript bundle. It is one HTML file and a folder of images, which means it will still work in five years and can move to any host in a minute.
Honest ratings. Two units show 5.0, one shows 4.63. Hiding the lowest number would have been easy and would have cost the page its credibility with the exact guest who checks Airbnb next.
It points at Airbnb rather than competing with it. The page exists so the owner has something to put on a business card and in an Instagram bio. Bookings still run through the platform that handles payment, messaging, and cancellation.
What it demonstrates
The useful skill here is not HTML. It is recognising that a client's "I don't have assets" usually means the assets exist somewhere already, in a form a script can read, and that the fastest path to approval is showing someone their own property rather than a template with their name dropped in.