Direct booking
The money side of taking the booking on your own domain: commission math, pricing, and what changes when the guest is yours.
How to charge a Booking.com virtual credit card, and when you cannot
You charge a Booking.com virtual credit card on or after the activation date Booking.com set on it, and not a day sooner, on your own Stripe account included. Here is when that date falls, what each route to collecting the money costs, and what a refund takes back.
Vacation rental invoice template: one payment, three units
A group booking paid as one charge becomes one invoice: one accommodation line per unit, one pooled tax line, and one row per reservation in your own records carrying only its own leg total.
Stripe vs Lodgify Payments: which should take your direct bookings
Lodgify Payments charges 2.90% plus $0.30 on a domestic US card, and Lodgify's 1% transaction fee applies even when you connect your own Stripe account. The fee table, what breaks, and the verdict by property profile.
Mews Payments: fees, safety, and whether to keep Stripe
Mews Payments is the card processing built into Mews: legitimate, safe for card data, and the sensible choice for a small property with no technical staff. Mews publishes no rate, and its new e-money license covers Europe only.
Airbnb transaction history: find, download and read it
Your Airbnb transaction history is in the Earnings dashboard under Paid, and Get report downloads it as a CSV. Here is how to find it, download it, print past receipts, tell it apart from the Earnings Summary and tax documents, and match it to your payouts.
Direct booking website cost: what small operators pay
Between zero and about $3,500 a year in software, plus 2.9% and 30 cents a payment. The published builder prices, what a build really costs in developer weeks, and how much business has to move direct before any of it pays for itself.
Is a direct booking website worth it for a small hotel?
For most properties at 8 to 25 rooms a direct booking website is worth it, and for four specific kinds of property it is not. Here is how to tell which one you are, the arithmetic that decides it with two worked examples, what the US and Canadian parity rules do to your discount, and the free work worth doing while you wait.
Cloudbeds Payments pricing vs your own Stripe account
Cloudbeds publishes no processing rate for Cloudbeds Payments, and Stripe publishes 2.9% plus 30 cents. What each does with a failed card, where the payout fee falls, who holds the guest's card and the record of a charge, and the verdict by property size.
Hotel rate parity: what your contract covers and what you can still do
Rate parity promises a booking platform the same or better price, conditions and availability than you make available anywhere else. Booking.com runs three versions of it, and the United States and Canada get the widest one by default. Here is what the clause reaches, what it can be used for, and the narrow routes that stay open.
Hotel post stay email templates for direct and platform guests
Your post stay email should ask for one thing, and which one depends on where the reservation came from. Booking.com is already collecting the review, so a platform guest gets the invitation back. A guest who came direct gets the review request. Both emails are written out, with where the address comes from.
How to keep hotel guests booking direct after checkout
A returning guest who books with you instead of the platform is worth about $65 more on a $540 stay, and you never pay for the introduction twice. Here is what that list is worth, how to reach it, and what to skip.
Price disparity: what it means and why platforms undercut your own site
Price disparity means one stay carrying two different prices in two places. At a small property it usually runs the wrong way, with your own website asking more than your platform listing, and four settings cause most of it: a platform discount you fund, a child billed as an extra guest, a lodging tax counted twice, and two totals that were never comparable.