THE COMMISSION IS THE COMPETITOR
HOSPITALITY & TRAVEL
The platforms are good at finding you guests who've never heard of you. They're a bad deal for the ones who have. Most of the work is telling those two apart.
Let's Define Terms
What is hospitality and travel marketing?
The distribution question sits underneath everything else. An OTA brings you a guest who didn't know you existed and takes a commission for it. For that guest it's often a fair trade. For the guest who already knows your name, it's paying to acquire someone you'd already earned.
So the work isn't a war on the platforms. It's separating discovery from booking. Travellers still find properties on the OTAs and increasingly through AI assistants that cite them, then open a second tab and check your site. Whether the booking closes there is entirely down to what they find.
Industry Snapshot
- Typical business models
- Independent hotels and groups, serviced apartments, restaurants, tour and experience operators
- Key channels
- Metasearch, search, OTAs as discovery, email and CRM, direct, social
- Core KPIs
- Direct booking share, commission saved, cost per direct booking, RevPAR, repeat guest rate
Key Challenges
Four things that keep bookings on somebody else's platform.
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The guest finds you, then books elsewhere
They land on your site, meet a slower booking engine than the one they left, and go back.
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Rate parity misunderstood as rate identity
If there's no reason to book direct, there's no direct booking.
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No idea what a direct booking actually costs
Commission is visible. Metasearch fees, booking engine costs and ad spend usually aren't, so nobody can compare the two.
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The guest list is the platform's, not yours
You served the stay. Somebody else owns the email address and the next booking.
Turning Bottlenecks Into Growth Levers
What we'd change before buying more traffic.
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The booking step
Speed, mobile and the number of screens between deciding and confirming. Most direct bookings are lost here, not upstream.
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Metasearch as the bridge
Your direct rate placed inside the comparison the traveller is already doing, rather than hoping they go looking for it.
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A real reason to book direct
Something an OTA can't match and the guest actually wants. Not five pounds off.
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Honest channel maths
What a direct booking costs you all-in against what a commissioned one does, so the mix is a decision rather than a habit.
Service Ecosystem
Our Hospitality & Travel Growth Stack
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Metasearch and paid media
Performance media across Meta, Google, and paid social, optimized specifically for ROAS - not just impressions or clicks.
Explore Paid Marketing -
SEO and local search
Organic visibility that reduces long-term dependency on paid spend, compounding traffic that doesn't disappear when a campaign budget runs out.
Explore SEO Services -
Web development and booking flow
Amazon and Flipkart listing optimization and ad management for brands running a hybrid D2C-plus-marketplace model.
Explore Marketplace Marketing -
Email and CRM
Storefront builds and rebuilds structured around the purchase flow that converts, not the one that was inherited.
Explore Web Development -
Brand and creative
Email, SMS and lifecycle programmes that turn a first order into a second one without buying the customer again.
Explore Retention Marketing
Results From Our Work, Across Sectors
What "it worked" looked like the last few times.
- 3.4x Online revenue growth for a D2C food brand within two quarters
- 41% Increase in repeat purchase rate after a retention rebuild, same brand
Featured Case Studies
Breaking Down a High-Impact Project
Northfield Organics
From Retail Brand to D2C Growth Engine
The Problem
Strong five-year retail presence, almost no direct-to-consumer traffic or repeat purchase behavior online. Site conversion sat under 1%.
The Strategy
Repositioned the brand around freshness, direct sourcing, and subscription convenience - the things retail shelf space couldn't offer - before rebuilding the site or launching paid campaigns.
FAQs
Straight Answers, No Sales Layer
Should we stop using the OTAs?
No, and anyone who says otherwise hasn't run a property. They're an efficient way to reach a guest who has never heard of you. The goal is a healthier mix, not an empty one.
What direct share should we be aiming for?
It depends on how much of your demand is brand-led. Rather than starting with a target, we'd start by working out what a direct booking actually costs you once metasearch, engine fees and ad spend are counted, then compare it to the commission properly.
Does the billboard effect still work?
Partly. Travellers still discover on a platform and check your site, and AI assistants have added a second version of the same pattern. What's changed is that it's no longer passive: the loop only closes if your site and booking engine are ready when they arrive.
How quickly will we see results?
Metasearch and paid can move direct bookings inside a month. Anything that depends on brand recall or repeat guests takes a season, and in this sector a season is the honest unit.
What do you need from us to start?
Your channel mix and commission costs, booking engine access, and your rate parity position. Those three tell us whether the problem is demand or distribution, and it's usually distribution. --- ---