Booking engine conversion work
Step count, mobile behaviour, rate presentation and abandonment points reviewed and rebuilt.
OTAs earn their commission when they bring you a guest who had never heard of you. They do not earn it when a guest sees your property on a marketplace, searches your name, lands on a slow website with a clumsy booking engine, gives up and books through the marketplace anyway. That second group is pure margin leakage, and in most independent hotels it is a large group.
Direct booking work targets exactly that gap: a booking engine that converts, a website fast enough to survive a mobile connection, brand-term protection in search, metasearch participation where the maths works, and retargeting for people who checked dates and left. The goal is not to abandon OTAs: it is to change the mix so your own channel takes the bookings it should already be taking.
The billboard effect, and where it leaks
A guest discovers you on a marketplace, likes the look of the property, then opens a new tab and searches your name. That behaviour is well documented and it is the single largest direct booking opportunity an independent hotel has, because the guest has already decided they want to stay with you.
What happens next decides whether you keep the commission. If your website takes six seconds to load on hotel-lobby wifi, buries the rate, hides availability behind two clicks, or hands the guest to a booking engine that looks like a different company, they go back to the tab they came from and book there. You paid for that guest twice.
Fixing the booking path before spending on traffic
Almost every property we audit could improve direct revenue more by fixing the path than by buying more visitors. Typical findings: the booking widget is below the fold on mobile, the date picker does not default to the guest's likely stay, rate plans are described in internal language nobody outside the hotel understands, and the engine adds three steps that exist for the vendor's benefit rather than the guest's.
We measure the path, remove the steps that do not earn their place, and re-test. It is cheaper than advertising and it improves every future rupee of advertising too.
Brand protection: not buying back your own guests
Search your hotel's name and you will often find an OTA ad above your own listing. That is legal and entirely rational for them, and it means a guest intending to book with you can be intercepted a second before they arrive.
A brand campaign is cheap because nobody else can score well on your own name, and it recovers traffic you would otherwise lose. It should always be reported separately from other paid activity, though, because brand conversions flatter blended numbers and can hide a weak prospecting campaign.
Metasearch, run on a cost-per-acquisition basis
Google Hotel Ads, Trivago and Tripadvisor put your direct rate next to the OTA rate at the exact moment of comparison. Done well, it is the highest-intent traffic available to a hotel. Done badly, it is an uncapped bill.
We run metasearch to an agreed cost per acquisition, with the comparison being the commission you would otherwise have paid. If the channel cannot beat that number it gets switched off, and we tell you so plainly.
Measuring it honestly
The right measure is net revenue after acquisition cost, by channel. A direct booking that cost more to win than the OTA commission is not a victory, and reporting it as one is how agencies keep budgets they have not earned.
Our reporting shows direct share, cost of acquiring it, and the commission avoided, so you can see whether the programme is genuinely paying for itself, month by month.