Should your B&B website be in French and German?

Who your overseas guests are

The Central Statistics Office counted about 6.4 million overseas visitors to Ireland in 2025. Great Britain accounted for 38%, Continental Europe for 33%, North America for 24% and the rest of the world for 5%.

Within mainland Europe, the CSO’s detailed table gives these full-year figures:

Country or area of residence	Visitors in 2025
Germany	about 433,000
France	about 356,000
Spain and Portugal	about 297,000
Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg	about 254,000
Italy	about 219,000
Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland	about 136,000

Germany and France are the two largest single countries in the list. These are all overnight visitors to Ireland, not B&B guests in particular, so your own mix may be quite different. A farmhouse B&B on the Wild Atlantic Way and a guesthouse near Dublin Airport will not see the same guests.

Meanwhile, most of the places they might stay speak to them only in English: 20 of the 21 Irish accommodation websites we audited in October 2026 were in English only.

Why their own language matters

Plenty of German and Dutch visitors read English well. That does not mean they prefer to book in it. In a European Commission survey of 13,500 internet users across the EU, 90% said they prefer to access websites in their own language. Only 18% bought online in another language “frequently or all the time”, and 42% said they never buy online in a language other than their own. The survey dates from January 2011, so treat the exact figures with care, but the pattern is easy to recognise.

For a B&B, the questions that decide a booking are practical: what is included in the price, what happens if I cancel, how do I get there without a car. Those are exactly the details a guest does not want to guess at in a second language.

Machine translation or human-checked translation?

Machine translation (DeepL, Google Translate or an AI tool) is fast and cheap, and good enough to give a reader the gist. Its weaknesses show up in exactly the places that matter to guests:

• tone that sounds odd or pushy to a native reader;
• local names, dishes and directions turned into nonsense;
• prices, dates and times in the wrong format;
• cancellation terms that say something slightly different from the English.

Fáilte Ireland’s brief on German holidaymakers gives a good example of the tone problem: it advises against translating “you will experience x” word for word, because in German it “comes across more of a demand” than a promise.

Translation checked by a native speaker costs more and takes longer, but it reads as if you wrote it for that guest. A sensible middle way is a machine draft that a native speaker then reads and corrects.

What Google says. Google’s spam policies list, as an example of “scaled content abuse”, scraping content to generate many pages, including through “automated transformations like synonymizing, translating”, where little value is provided to users. That policy targets pages made mainly to manipulate search rankings, not a B&B translating its own room pages for real guests. Still, it is one more reason to have a person check what goes on your site.

Translation buttons and widgets. A plug-in that translates the page in the visitor’s browser is better than nothing for the guest in front of you, but it usually creates no separate pages for search engines. Google recommends “using different URLs for each language version of a page rather than using cookies or browser settings”, and warns that if content changes dynamically, it “might not find and crawl all your variations”. In other words, a widget will not help a German searching in German to find you.

Which languages first

Start with your own data rather than national averages:

• your booking system or platform reports, if they show guest countries;
• your guest book and enquiry emails from the last two seasons;
• the country report in Google Search Console or your website statistics.

If German and French guests come up again and again, start there. If you get many Dutch, Spanish or Italian guests, one of those may be the better first choice. One language done well beats four done badly: every language is a set of pages you will have to keep up to date.

What to translate, and what to leave

Translate:

• your home page;
• each room or unit page (beds, bathroom, size, what is included);
• prices, or a “from” price, with the season it applies to;
• check-in and check-out times, deposit and cancellation terms;
• directions from the nearest airport, town or bus stop, and parking;
• your contact page, including whether you speak the language yourself.

You can leave in English, at least at first: long blog posts, old news, detailed local history, and guest reviews (they are more convincing in the reviewer’s own words). Keep names as they are: your house name, townlands and places stay in English or Irish.

Google warns that translating only the template text (menus, buttons, footer) while the main content stays in one language can give searchers a poor experience. Translate a few full pages properly rather than every page halfway.

The technical basics

These points come from Google’s own documentation on multilingual sites:

1. One web address per language. For example yoursite.ie/de/ for German and yoursite.ie/fr/ for French. Subfolders like these are easy to set up and maintain.
2. hreflang tags. These tell Google which pages are translations of each other, so it can show a French searcher the French page. Each language version “must list itself as well as all other language versions”; if two pages do not point to each other, the tags are ignored. An x-default value names the page to show when no language matches, usually your English home page.
3. A visible language switch. Google suggests adding links to the other language versions of each page, so visitors can choose. Label each language in its own language: Deutsch, Français.
4. No automatic redirect. Google advises: “Avoid automatically redirecting users from one language version of a site to a different language version”, and “Don’t use IP analysis to adapt your content.” A German living in Galway may want the English page; let them choose.

Google works out a page’s language from its visible text, not from the code, which is another reason to translate the main content and not just the template.

Cost and effort

Translators usually charge by the word, so count the words on the pages you plan to translate before asking for quotes. A home page, room pages, prices, policies and directions are usually a manageable job; it is the blog and local guide that make a site long.

If you work with a web designer, ask three questions: who checks the translation, how the language versions are set up (separate addresses and hreflang, or a widget), and what it costs to change a price or a policy in every language later.

Keeping translations up to date

An out-of-date translation is worse than none: a French page that still shows last year’s rates or an old cancellation policy will cause problems at check-in.

• Keep a simple list of every translated page.
• When you change prices, dates or policies in English, change every language on the same day.
• Once a year, before the season, read each language version from top to bottom, or ask a guest who speaks it.

Not sure how your current site looks to a visitor from abroad? Our free website check shows what is missing, and the B&B website checklist covers the rest.