What 18% Actually Costs You

There’s a cost on your books that never appears as a line item, because it’s baked into every reservation that arrives through an OTA.

You know the commission exists. What’s worth doing — once — is seeing what it adds up to.

The arithmetic

Take a room at $350. An OTA takes between 15% and 25%, depending on the platform, your agreement, and how visible you’ve let them make you.

Call it 18%.

That’s $63 per booking.

Now scale it to a year:

For a 20-room property running healthy occupancy, 500 OTA bookings a year is not a pessimistic number. It’s a normal one.

So read that third row again. $31,500. For a small property, that is frequently the largest single marketing expense on the books — larger than photography, larger than PR, larger than anything you’d consciously approve in a budget meeting.

It’s just never been presented to you as one number.

The part that stings

Commission isn’t only expensive. It’s expensive for guests who were already yours.

Think about how someone ends up on Booking.com looking at your property. They heard about you somewhere — a friend, an article, your Instagram, a previous stay. They typed your name into a search bar. And then they booked through a platform that charged you $63 for the introduction.

You paid a finder’s fee for a guest who had already found you.

What it actually buys

To be fair to the OTAs: they earned some of that money. They gave you distribution, a booking engine, and a checkout that people already trust with their card details. For a property with no visibility, that’s worth something real.

The problem isn’t that they charge. It’s that the fee is fixed while the value isn’t.

An OTA is worth 18% when it introduces you to someone who’d never heard of you. It’s worth considerably less when it stands between you and someone who was already looking for your name.

The realistic move

Nobody is suggesting you leave the platforms. They bring demand, and demand is hard.

The move is to shift the mix — to make the guests who already know you book with you directly.

Say you take 500 OTA bookings a year. If a better direct experience moves 15% of those — 75 bookings — to your own site, you keep $4,725 you were previously handing over.

Move 30% and it’s $9,450 a year, every year, on the same rooms at the same rates with the same guests.

That’s the whole argument. Not more traffic. Not lower rates. Just fewer introductions you didn’t need.

Where the leak usually is

It is almost never the rate. Guests who abandon your site for an OTA rarely do it because the OTA is cheaper — in most cases the rate is identical.

They do it because the OTA told them, immediately, on a phone, whether the room was available and what it cost. And your site made them work for it.

That’s a design problem. It’s fixable.

We design and build Framer websites for boutique hotels and independent hospitality brands — sites built to win direct bookings. If you’d like to know what your own booking flow is costing you, get in touch.