Direct booking share

The direct booking share is the portion of bookings that come in directly via the hotel's own booking engine, phone, or email. It is the counterweight to OTA dependency and one of the few distribution metrics a property can actively influence.

A low direct booking share is not an act of nature. It is the result of decisions -- usually decisions nobody made deliberately.

What we see in practice: A 70-room city hotel with a 68% OTA share at 15% commission and EUR 1.3 million in rooms revenue pays around EUR 133,000 in commission per year. Lift the direct share by ten points -- to 42% -- and the property saves close to EUR 20,000 per year without serving a single guest less. Improving the booking engine, enforcing rate parity, contacting repeat guests directly: those are not large projects. They are moves any property can make. Many don't, because nobody put the number on the table that would justify it.