TL;DR
I built a Turkish, English and Hungarian website for Hotel Perula, a boutique hotel in Sultanahmet. Hungarian was a deliberate market bet backed by a guide blog, direct booking replaced dependence on the OTAs, and the site loads in under a second. Three months in: about 530 organic clicks, 34,000 impressions, and Hungary as the second country by clicks.
A good share of the tourists landing in Istanbul have not chosen their hotel yet. They take out a phone, search "Sultanahmet hotel" in their own language and pick one of the first few results. For a hotel, the website is no longer a brand showcase. It is a direct booking source.
Hotel Perula is a boutique hotel that has been operating since 2011 in the very centre of Sultanahmet. The Blue Mosque is a hundred metres away, Hagia Sophia two hundred and fifty, and almost every landmark of the old city is within walking distance. Its guests are overwhelmingly international rather than Turkish, and one market stood out: Hungary.
This is the story of the trilingual (Turkish, English, Hungarian) site I built for it, and what has happened since.
The starting point
The hotel had an ageing website and took nearly all of its bookings through the online travel agencies, paying commission on every stay. Two goals came out of the first conversation: bring guests to the hotel's own booking channel, and win a market that competitors were ignoring.
Three languages: why Hungarian?
The most consequential decision on a multilingual site is which languages to support. English is mandatory. Turkish is mandatory for the local market. The third language is a strategic choice, and for Hotel Perula it was Hungarian.
Two reasons. First, a meaningful number of the hotel's Sultanahmet guests are Hungarian, and the number of hotels publishing anything in Hungarian can be counted on one hand. Second, the owners could write Hungarian content themselves, which made both the launch content and long-term updates sustainable.
In practice that decision produced this: for Hungarian queries such as "Isztambul szállás Sultanahmet" or "Kék Mecset közelében hotel", the hotel started appearing on the first page, where competition is a fraction of what it is in English.
What was delivered
- A trilingual site (TR/EN/HU) with every page written for its language, no automatic translation
- A direct booking flow, so a guest who finds the hotel on an OTA can book on the hotel's own site
- An airport transfer request form, and automated confirmation and reminder emails
- A guide blog in all three languages, aimed at the questions travellers ask before the trip
- Hotel and review markup so the property's stars and review count appear in Google
- The domain and DNS moved under one roof, with sub-second load times worldwide
Content that meets the guest before the booking
"Book now" is not enough on a boutique hotel site. Hotel Perula's guide section does the work that a brochure cannot: it answers what a traveller is actually searching for and introduces the hotel at the natural moment.
On the Hungarian side that meant practical guides to the landmarks around Sultanahmet, written for Hungarian travellers: a visiting guide to Hagia Sophia, its history, Topkapı Palace six hundred metres from the hotel, and airport transfers to Istanbul. A Hungarian reader of the Hagia Sophia guide meets a line about accommodation two hundred and fifty metres away and is taken to the rooms page.
One detail the machine-translation route would have missed: Hungarian has its own names for the city. Not "Blue Mosque" but Kék Mecset, not "Sea of Marmara" but Márvány-tenger. Content written in the language, by someone who speaks it, captures both the right searches and the right cultural references.
Knowing which buttons work
Every click on a direct-booking button is counted, without cookies or personal data, and shown to the hotel on a private dashboard by placement and by day. That is how we know the mobile bottom bar and the prompts inside the guides do most of the work, and where to invest next.
Performance
The site loads in under a second in all three languages, and all three Core Web Vitals sit inside Google's "Good" range. Mobile performance is especially critical for hotels: a tourist arriving in Istanbul for the first time, dragging a suitcase, on mobile data, looking for a place to sleep. Five seconds of loading is a lost booking.
Results so far
Three months after launch, Google Search Console shows about 530 organic clicks and 34,000 impressions, with impressions growing every month: roughly 7,700 in April to 23,500 in May. The Hungarian-first strategy held. Hungary is the second country by clicks after Turkey, and the site ranks on page one for Hungarian searches about Topkapı, Hagia Sophia and Sultanahmet. Guests meet the hotel while researching the trip, before they have heard its name.
The property now shows its stars and review count in Google, runs an active direct-booking channel, and stands out in Sultanahmet with more than 500 Google reviews.
Conclusion
A trilingual boutique hotel website does not end with a language menu. The right languages, content written for the traveller, a booking channel the hotel owns, and a site fast enough for a phone on the street all have to work together. Hotel Perula demanded care on every one of those fronts, and the numbers three months in are the reason it was worth it.
Other projects are on the references page, and the hotel website page explains what is included and how pricing works. If you are considering a site for a hotel, a clinic or another business, the contact form is the place to start.
