Direct bookings: how many it takes to pay for a hotel website

A hotel owner asked me whether it was worth rebuilding his website. I answered with a question: how many extra direct nights would it take to pay for it? He didn't know, and almost nobody does — yet it's a sum you can do in two minutes with three numbers already in your property management system.

This article won't tell you whether your site needs rebuilding. It gives you the method to decide for yourself, and the threshold below which the answer is no.

The whole thing is one formula

What you need to know is how much you save on a booking that comes through your own site instead of a portal. It's the commission you don't pay:

saving per booking = average rate × nights per stay × commission

On a typical Italian property, commission runs from 15% to 20% of the stay. So a three-night booking at €120 is worth, as a saving, somewhere between €54 and €72.

The rest follows on its own:

direct bookings needed = monthly cost of the site ÷ saving per booking

An example, and it should be read as one. Average rate €120, three nights per stay, commission at 18%: you save around €65 a booking. A bilingual site on a monthly fee costs €790. That's twelve direct bookings a month to cover it.

Twelve. Not a hundred and twenty.

With twenty rooms at 65% average occupancy you're selling around 390 nights a month. Twelve three-night bookings are thirty-six nights: 9% of what you sell. That's a share that moves.

Those numbers aren't yours. Put yours in below — rooms, rate, occupancy, the share that comes through portals — and the tool does the sum, without asking for your email.

What almost nobody knows: since 2017 you can charge less on your own site

Here's the point that's worth the whole article, and that most of the properties I visit don't know about.

Until a few years ago, contracts with the portals carried a rate parity clause: you couldn't offer a better price on your own site than the one shown on the portal. In Italy that clause no longer exists. Law 124 of 4 August 2017, the annual competition law, declared null any clause preventing a property from offering better prices and conditions of its own.

It has been in force for eight years. Italy has one of the clearest bans in Europe, and it makes the direct channel structurally more rewarding here than elsewhere.

It means you can legitimately make the same room cost less on your own site. And it doesn't even have to be a discount in euros: flexible check-in, a better room for the same price, easier cancellation, breakfast included. Anything, as long as it's real and said where the person is deciding.

The sum isn't the first month

The twelve bookings in that example don't turn up in January because you put a site online in December. The direct share moves in stages, because it runs through three different things on three different clocks: the booking journey gets fixed in weeks, search rankings in months, guests who come back directly in seasons.

An honest horizon is the second season. The first goes on building, getting indexed, and collecting the first guests who return. Anyone promising a return within the first quarter is looking at one number and ignoring the other two.

What the sum leaves out, and it's fair to say it

If saving the commission were the whole story, the conclusion would be "leave the portals", and it would be wrong.

OTAs bring guests who would never have found you. Someone searching "hotel Salina" on Booking doesn't know your property, and in many cases would never have looked for it by name. That visibility has a value, and the commission is its price. For a young property, or in a market where you aren't known, it's often the most efficient channel there is.

The argument that holds is narrower: paying commission to win a new guest makes sense; paying it a second time on the same guest makes much less. The sensible goal isn't getting out of the portals. It's shifting a share — the returning guests, the searches by name, the people who have already seen you and are only looking for where to book.

There's one more thing on the direct side that the commission sum doesn't see: on your own site you have the guest's data. Email, preferences, history. Through a portal, often not. That's the difference between a customer and a transaction.

When the answer is no

There are properties for which this sum doesn't work, and I'd rather say so first.

Below eight rooms, rarely. The argument rests on volume: with four rooms, twelve direct bookings a month is a share of occupancy nobody realistically shifts, and the fee becomes a percentage of turnover no sound business spends on a website. There it makes more sense to look after your portal listings and your Google profile properly, and stop there.

From fifteen rooms up the picture changes entirely: the site costs around 1-2% of annual turnover, and the bookings needed to cover it are a small fraction of what you sell.

And if your direct share is already high, there's less to gain than it looks: you're already doing the right thing, and the sum has to be redone on the real difference, not on total commissions.

For the sum to work, the journey has to work

A new site shifts nothing on its own. If the booking engine takes six steps, if the price on your site is identical to the portal's, if your photos are worse than the ones the portal cropped for you, people go back to where they feel more comfortable — and they're right to.

The practical steps — working out where bookings come from today, fixing the journey, getting found by people searching the area rather than the property, giving a real reason to book direct — are in the guide to direct bookings, which is the natural sequel to this page.

What the site costs, so the question isn't left half-answered

The figures in the example are mine, and I keep them published. For a place to stay the relevant one is the two-language version, because a single language makes no sense when you host people from abroad:

	Monthly fee	One-off project
2 languages	€790 – €1,090/month	€6,400 – €8,400
3 languages	€990 – €1,290/month	€7,900 – €9,900

The fee includes four to eight hours of work a month, direct phone support, and no setup cost: the first three months are paid up front. Twelve-month minimum, and after the first twelve instalments the site is yours. All the terms are on the service page, and the reasoning behind the prices in how much a website costs.

To budget separately, because they don't come through me: the booking engine and the channel manager carry their own subscriptions to their own suppliers.

Where to start

Do the sum with your own numbers. If the direct bookings you'd need are a reasonable fraction of what you already sell, the question stops being whether to rebuild the site and becomes when.

If you'd rather have an answer before deciding, there's the digital check-up: it costs €1,250, I go through the site you have now, your numbers and the properties you compete with, and leave you a document listing what to do in order of impact. If we then go ahead with the work, 50% comes off the quote.

Otherwise write to me and tell me how many rooms you have and how much of your business comes through the portals. If I don't think the sum works, I'll say so.