Direct Bookings vs Commission: What Kerry Accommodation Owners Should Know

Sit down with any hotel, B&B or guesthouse owner in Kerry at the end of the season and there’s one line in the accounts that makes everyone wince. Commission.

The big online travel agents, the OTAs, take somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of every booking that comes through them. Not of your profit. Of the whole booking. Room rate, extra night, the lot. And because so many owners treat the OTAs as their entire booking system, that percentage quietly becomes one of the biggest costs in the business.

I’m not going to tell you to pull off the OTAs. That would be daft, and I’ll explain why further down. But I am going to show you what that commission actually adds up to, and why a proper website with its own booking engine wins a good chunk of those bookings back, commission free.

What OTA commission actually costs over a season

Let’s take a realistic example. Say you run a six room guesthouse outside Killarney. Average rate of €120 a night, and a decent season fills those rooms for about 150 nights of the year. That’s roughly €108,000 in room revenue.

Now say 70 percent of your bookings come through OTAs, which is normal for a property that leans on them. That’s €75,600 booked through third parties. At 18 percent commission, you hand over about €13,600 for the season.

Thirteen and a half grand. Every year. For bookings from guests who, in many cases, had already decided to stay with you.

Nobody wins all of that back. But shifting even a third of those OTA bookings to your own website puts €4,500 a year back in your pocket. Shift half and it’s nearly €7,000. A website that does that pays for itself many times over, and it keeps paying every season after.

Guests check your website before they book anyway

Here’s the part that makes direct bookings very winnable. Most guests don’t book on the first OTA page they land on. They find you on an OTA, then they open a new tab and search for your property by name. They want to see the real place. More photos, the breakfast, the rooms, how far you actually are from town.

The industry calls this the billboard effect. The OTA is the billboard, your website is the shop.

So the guest is already on your site, card in hand, ready to book. What happens next decides who gets the commission. If your site is slow, looks ten years old, or has no way to book, they shrug and go back to the OTA tab. If your site is fast, looks the part, and has a book now button with a small reason to use it, you just kept 18 percent of that booking.

What a direct booking website actually needs

This is where most accommodation websites in Kerry fall down. They were built as brochures, not booking tools. Here’s what the job actually requires.

• Fast pages on mobile. The majority of your guests are browsing on a phone, often on hotel wifi or patchy holiday data. If your homepage takes six seconds to load, they’re gone before they see a single room.
• Real photos. Your actual rooms, your actual breakfast, your actual view. Guests can smell stock photography a mile off, and it makes them trust the OTA listing more than your own site. That’s backwards.
• A book now button on every page. Not a contact form. Not “email us to check availability.” A live booking engine showing real availability and taking payment there and then. Guests booking at 11pm won’t wait for a reply in the morning. If you want the detail on how these work, I’ve written up the options on my online booking systems page.
• Prices that match the OTAs. If a guest checks your site and your rate is higher than the OTA rate, you’ve just trained them never to check your site again. Your direct rate should never be worse.
• A reason to book direct. This is the clincher. A slightly better rate, free parking, a free room upgrade when available, late checkout, a bottle of wine for stays of three nights or more. It doesn’t need to be expensive. It needs to be visible, right beside the book now button, so the guest can see they’re getting something the OTA can’t give them.

None of this is complicated. But it does need to be built properly, which is why I put together dedicated pages on web design for hotels in Kerry and web design for B&Bs and guesthouses covering what I build for each.

The OTAs still have a place

Now for the balance. The OTAs are not the enemy. They put your property in front of people in Boston and Berlin who have never heard of you and never would have otherwise. For first time guests, that visibility is worth paying for. Think of commission on a brand new guest as a marketing cost, and a fairly reasonable one.

The problem is paying that same commission on the second visit, the third visit, and the booking from the guest’s sister who got your name over Sunday dinner. Those people are looking for you specifically. They should land on your website and book direct, and every one of them who books through an OTA instead is commission you didn’t need to pay.

That’s the strategy in one line. Let the OTAs find you new guests, and let your own website keep them.

A quick check you can do tonight

Search for your property by name on your phone, tap into your website, and try to book a room. Time yourself. If you can’t get from Google to a confirmed booking in about two minutes, your guests can’t either, and the OTAs are collecting commission on bookings that should be yours.

If that little test goes badly, ring me on 066 717 4067 or get in touch here. I’ll take a look at your site, do the commission sums for your actual numbers, and tell you straight whether a direct booking website makes sense for your property. No charge for the conversation, and no hard sell either.

You’re already paying for those bookings. The question is whether you keep paying 18 percent for guests who were coming to you anyway.