Case study · Web design & booking · Romania
Chalet Sol
A luxury chalet's booking-ready storefront
Twenty-three kilometres from Cluj, Chalet Sol sleeps sixteen across eight bedrooms — a private jacuzzi open to the mountains, a covered terrace, a chef's kitchen. "Tranquility meets luxury" is the promise. Cittago built the dark, cinematic site that makes it — and wired a booking engine underneath that turns a long look into a paid, invoiced reservation.
The challenge
Luxury is a feeling you have to earn online.
A sixteen-guest chalet is a group decision, made on a phone, compared against a dozen other tabs. The photos have three seconds to say "worth it" — and then the site has to do something most don't: actually take the booking. A deposit to hold the dates. Seasonal pricing. A minimum stay over New Year. An invoice the group organiser can expense.
Chalet Sol had the property and the photography. What it needed was a storefront that felt as considered as the chalet, and a reservation engine that could carry the unglamorous weight underneath — availability, rules, payments and paperwork — without a receptionist and without leaking every second booking to a platform that takes its cut.
What we built
Dark, cinematic, and quietly transactional
We built a near-black, cinematic site led by the chalet's own light — the jacuzzi at dusk, the A-frame windows, the whole house glowing against the valley at night. It feels like the place. And it opens with the one thing a group actually needs: a check-in / check-out box, front and centre, that checks real availability.
Under the surface sits the full engine — seasonal and weekday rates, minimum stays, packages and coupons, deposits, card and bank-transfer payment, automatic SmartBill invoicing. It's built on Elementor Pro, so the team edits rates, photos and offers themselves. Direct bookings stay commission-free, and every payment settles its own paperwork.
Eight bedrooms, a chef's kitchen, room for sixteen — in three frames
The build
Run by the people who run the place.
The site isn't a brochure someone else has to maintain. It's built on Elementor Pro — so the team changes a price, swaps a photo or adds a package themselves, in minutes, with no developer on call.
Edit without code
The whole site is visual and drag-and-drop — text, photos and prices change in minutes.
One design system
Colours, fonts and spacing are global; set once, they stay consistent on every page.
Reusable templates
Headers, footers and layouts are built once and reused, so nothing drifts out of style.
Truly responsive
Separate desktop, tablet and phone controls mean it looks right on any screen.
Popups built in
Seasonal offers, newsletter capture and notices without bolting on extra plugins.
Dynamic content
Room data, rates and availability pull in automatically instead of being retyped.
A lean widget library
Sliders, galleries, forms and maps are native — fewer plugins, less to break.
Fast by design
Clean output and performance controls keep load times low — better SEO, more bookings.
Fine layout & motion
Subtle animation and pixel-level control, all without touching code.
Cheap to change
The most-used builder on the web, so tweaks are quick and inexpensive — from us or any developer.
The reservation engine
A booking system, not a booking form.
Behind the check-in box sits a full reservation engine — rates, rules, payments and paperwork, automated end to end. Everything a busy host needs, and nothing they have to think about.
Rates & availability
- Live availability calendar
- Season-based dynamic pricing
- Weekday & weekend rate rules
- Promotional packages
- Discounts & discount coupons
Stay rules
- Minimum-stay limits
- Mandatory check-in days
- Mandatory check-out days
- Whole-chalet availability control
- Blocked & special dates
Payments
- Pay by bank transfer
- Pay by card online
- Full payment or a deposit
- Just 1% fee on card payments
- Auto-generated reservation code
Automation
- Automatic email confirmations
- Proforma invoice on transfer
- Fiscal invoice on card (SmartBill)
- Guest & booking records in one place
- Seamless updates, resilient under load
Payments & invoicing
Paid and invoiced, automatically.
1%
The lowest card fee we could source
Just 1% on every online card payment — so more of each booking stays with the host, not the processor.
Invoiced by SmartBill
The booking engine is wired to SmartBill: every paid reservation raises the right document with zero manual work.
Proforma or fiscal — automatically
A bank transfer raises a proforma; a card payment raises a fiscal invoice on the spot. The guest gets it by email; the books stay clean.
Full or partial payment
Guests pay in full or leave a deposit to hold the dates — the system tracks the balance through to arrival.
The outcome
16 guests
Eight bedrooms and nine baths, bookable in one flow
Direct
Reservations and deposits taken on-site, commission-free
Auto-invoiced
Proforma or fiscal invoice raised the moment it's paid
1% card fee
The lowest online-card cost we could source
Chalet Sol takes its bookings where the guest is already looking — on its own site, with the deposit secured and the invoice in their inbox before they close the tab. Robust through a full season, and simple enough that the team runs it themselves.
How we work
Four steps, every time.
Discovery call
Thirty free minutes to understand the business, the market, and where the money actually leaks.
Custom strategy
A plan built around the one metric that matters — not a template, not a channel checklist.
Implementation
Senior hands build it: campaigns, pages, tracking — the whole funnel wired as one system.
Monitor & optimise
We watch the numbers every week and cut what doesn’t pay, so results compound instead of fading.
I recommend Cittago agency for its professionalism and dedication. I have been working with them for over 10 years. Thanks to them and their website design, marketing campaigns, google ads and everything related to online, our businesses are continously growing. I totally recommend them and thank them for the services provided.
A fair first step
Want a site that takes its own bookings?
Thirty minutes with a senior strategist, no script and no pitch. We'll look at how you take reservations today and sketch what a direct, commission-free booking engine would change — yours to keep, whoever builds it.
15 years · 5.0 on Google · 56 brands · 11.4× average return on ads · 6 countries
