Taking back the booking from the platforms that owned it

Four properties, ninety percent of bookings arriving through OTAs at eighteen percent commission. Rebuilt direct booking as the primary channel and moved twenty-two points of volume off the platforms.

Sector: Boutique hospitality group
Duration: 9 months
Disciplines: Performance Media · Analytics · Lifecycle & CRM

Results

Direct booking share: +22pts10% to 32% of bookings
Annual commission saved: €410KRun-rate at month nine
Return on ad spend: 4.1xDirect channel, verified
Average daily rate: +18%Direct vs OTA bookings

The group added roughly four hundred thousand euros of margin without adding a room or raising a rate. Direct guests also stayed longer and spent more on property, which made the case for the fifth site the following year.

01 — The challenge

Hôtel Sable was full and barely profitable. The group ran four properties at strong occupancy, but the online travel agencies delivered nine bookings in ten and took eighteen percent of each one. Every attempt to shift guests direct had been a discount — which trained the market to wait for one and made the OTA rate look like the real rate. The group also had no idea which of its marketing worked: the booking engine and the analytics disagreed by roughly forty percent, so every performance debate ended in a disagreement about the data instead of a decision.

02 — The strategy

Fix the measurement before spending another euro

Nine months of media decisions had been made on numbers nobody trusted. We rebuilt tracking server-side, reconciled the booking engine against analytics to within three percent, and established a single weekly revenue number. Nothing else in the engagement would have held without it.

Compete on access rather than price

Discounting against an OTA is a losing trade. Instead we made the direct channel materially better — early check-in, the two rooms never released to platforms, the restaurant table that could not be booked any other way. The direct rate stayed at parity; the direct offer did not.

Treat the past guest as the cheapest acquisition available

The group had eleven thousand past guests and no way to reach them. Building that database into a segmented programme turned a dormant asset into the highest-margin revenue line in the business.

03 — What was built

Server-side tracking, booking engine reconciliation and a unified revenue dashboard
Direct-only benefit programme designed with the operations team and enforced at property level
Paid search restructured around property, city and category intent with OTA conquesting
Metasearch management across Google Hotel Ads and Trivago on a target-return basis
Pre-arrival, in-stay and post-stay CRM sequences with segmentation by property and stay purpose
Guest database consolidation — 11,000 records unified across four property systems