Your December statement from a booking platform shows £14,600 of commission. That is a member of staff. It is also, on the same statement, attached to £83,000 of room revenue you would have had to find somewhere else. Both sentences are true, and the argument about online travel agents in British hotels usually gets stuck because people only say one of them.
What the platforms actually cost
Commission on the major platforms commonly sits somewhere between 15% and 20% of the room rate, varying by contract, by market and by whether you have joined a visibility or preferred partner programme that raises your position in search results in exchange for a higher rate. Some models charge the guest and remit you a net rate; others bill you monthly for stays that have already happened.
Three things are easy to miss when you compare that to your own website.
Commission is usually charged on the full room rate including any extras booked through the platform, and in some contracts on the rate including VAT, which makes the effective percentage of your net revenue higher than the headline. Read which.
Cancelled and no show bookings are handled differently between platforms and between rate plans, and a hotel with a high cancellation rate on non prepaid rates can find itself paying commission on revenue it never collected.
And the marginal cost is not the commission alone. A booking through a platform arrives with the guest's relationship owned by somebody else. You do not necessarily get a usable email address, you cannot easily market to them again, and the repeat stay may come through the same channel at the same commission.
The billboard effect is real and smaller than the invoice
The counter argument has a name. The billboard effect is the observation that being listed on a large booking platform generates direct bookings too, because guests find you there, then go to your own website to book. Anyone who has watched their direct traffic after a listing went live knows it exists.
What is much harder is sizing it. The honest position is that some proportion of your direct bookings are caused by your platform listing and you cannot cleanly measure which. That uncertainty is exactly why delisting entirely is such a risky move: hotels that have tried it often report a fall in direct bookings as well as platform bookings, and the recovery takes longer than the budget allowed.
The sensible framing is not platform versus direct. It is what proportion of your business should come through each channel, and what you are willing to spend to shift it.
A direct booking is not free, it just costs differently
Work out your cost per direct booking properly before you celebrate one. It includes:
- Your booking engine subscription and any per booking fee
- Payment processing, which you also pay on platform bookings settled by you
- Search advertising, including bidding on your own hotel name, which you will end up doing
- The website itself, its photography, and the person who keeps it current
- Any rate discount or perk you offer to book direct
- Time spent on telephone bookings, which are direct and are not free
Add those up over a year and divide by the number of direct bookings. Plenty of small hotels discover their all in cost of acquisition is not far off what the platform charges, particularly once the discount they offer to book direct is included. That is not an argument for giving up. It is an argument for spending the effort where it actually pays.
Where it pays most reliably is repeat business. A guest who stayed and enjoyed it is cheap to reach again, provided you captured a lawful marketing permission at the time. That is the one advantage a direct relationship gives you that no commission rate can match. Under UK GDPR and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations you need a proper basis for emailing them, so collect it at check in, honestly and once.
Rate parity is less fixed than you think
Parity clauses come in two forms. Wide parity, preventing you from offering a lower rate anywhere including other platforms. Narrow parity, preventing you from undercutting the platform on your own website.
Wide parity was given up across Europe after sustained pressure from competition authorities, and the position has continued to move: the European Union's Digital Markets Act designated a major booking platform as a gatekeeper in 2024, with consequences for parity terms, and national regulators have taken their own steps. The practical advice is the same it has always been. Read your own contract, because what applies to you is what you signed, not what you read in a trade headline.
Even where a parity clause binds your public rate, several things typically remain open:
- Closed member rates behind a login
- Rates bundled with something the platform does not sell, such as dinner or parking
- Value added at the property, from a room upgrade to a late checkout
- Rates offered by telephone rather than published
Those are the tools most independents use, and they work because the guest comparing prices sees the same number and a better offer.
The decision is portfolio, not principle
Treat distribution the way you would treat a supplier base. Nobody sensible buys everything from one company, and nobody sensible refuses to use the largest company in the market on principle.
A workable shape for an independent property is to know, month by month, the split of your room nights by channel and the net rate each one produced after commission and acquisition cost. Then move deliberately: raise direct share in the months where you have demand you can capture yourself, and lean on the platforms in the months where you genuinely need reach, which for most British hotels is the shoulder season and the dead weeks after Christmas.
The mistake to avoid is undercutting yourself. A hotel that discounts on its own site to beat the platform, while still paying for the advertising that brought the guest there, has taken the worst of both. Direct should mean better, not cheaper.
Where this shows up in the game
Hotels arrive in Business Baron with the Hotels & Leisure Track, an add-on to the full game. Marketing in the game is campaigns with a brief, a budget, a channel mix and a target, and attribution misleads you the way real attribution does. That is the right frame for a booking you think was direct and the platform thinks was theirs.