Website Design · 2026
Designing a direct-booking website for an Aruba rental
Aruba counted 1,515,102 stayover visitors in 2025, up 6.6% on 2024, and the share sleeping outside hotels, in the Aruba Tourism Authority's “other accommodation” group that includes rentals, rose from 32.9% to 35.1%. The ATA now reports vacation-rental results every month on the government's news site, and December 2025 closed at 60% occupancy and an average daily rate of US$449. Those are the guests a direct-booking website for an Aruba home is built to catch, and plenty of them have stayed on the island before. Your site has to answer what a returning Aruba guest checks before paying you directly: which beach, which bedrooms, what's inside the price, and who answers the email.
Who an Aruba site speaks to, and in which languages
The December 2025 arrivals set the order. North America was 77.7% of stayovers, with 102,747 Americans (70.1% of the month) and 11,159 Canadians. Latin America was 14.8%, led by Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, with 7,283 Colombians and 5,956 Argentines. Europe was 4.7%, including 3,348 Dutch visitors. So English carries the main site, Spanish is the first translation, Dutch follows for the July and August family trips, and Brazilian Portuguese earns a page once the Spanish is live. Publish each language as its own set of URLs with hreflang tags (en, es, nl, pt-BR) so search engines and AI assistants serve the right version; a translate widget leaves them nothing to index. Quote in US dollars, the currency Aruba rentals already sell in, and add a euro estimate on the Dutch pages. Keep the Aruban florin for your tax paperwork.
What the site has to show by law, and who enforces it
Aruba's tourist tax, the toeristenheffing, has been 12.5% of what the guest pays for the room since 1 January 2023, and the law puts it on whoever operates the accommodation. On your own site no platform collects it for you, so build it into the quoted total and say so in one line: “includes Aruba's 12.5% tourist tax.” The Tax Department (DIMP) enforces it, and the ATA puts the island's yearly shortfall from untaxed rentals at 60 to 70 million florins, so expect scrutiny. Keep the US$20 sustainability fee off your invoice: each air traveller aged 8 and over pays it once per calendar year on the online ED card before check-in, and a short note saying so saves a stack of pre-arrival email. For U.S. guests, the FTC's fees rule has required lodging to show the all-in price, mandatory fees included, since May 2025; whether it reaches an owner in Oranjestad is a lawyer's question, and an all-in total is the safe design anyway. A registration law, under which every owner with a listing registers before renting, has been in preparation since at least 2024, so leave a slot on each property page for the number the day it exists. On privacy, Aruba's Landsverordening persoonsregistratie (AB 2011 no. 37) has no specific cookie clauses, while the EU's GDPR reaches businesses outside the EU that offer services to people inside it, so a site courting Dutch families needs a GDPR-grade consent banner. Confirm all of it with DIMP, the Ministry of Tourism and a local attorney before launch.
Pages and photos that sell Aruba
Guests search Aruba by beach and district, so give each one a page: Eagle Beach for the low-rise stretch, Palm Beach for the high-rise strip and its restaurants, Noord for pool villas a short drive inland, Malmok and Arashi for the snorkelling coves of the northwest coast, Oranjestad for the walkable capital, and Savaneta and San Nicolas for the quieter south. The government has itself named downtown Oranjestad and San Nicolas as areas where rentals fit, which gives a home there a clean story. Add a Carnival page and a getting-here page from Queen Beatrix International Airport, where U.S.-bound guests clear American immigration before the flight home under the preclearance agreement. Then shoot and state what Aruba guests filter on: air conditioning in every bedroom, shade on the pool deck in the afternoon, a terrace sheltered from the trade wind, parking for the rental jeep, and the walk to the sand in minutes, timed on foot by you. Those same area pages carry your SEO and your GEO work.