Fix your own price first. Then write to the guests you already have, fill in your Google Business Profile, turn on Google's free booking links, and put a checkout and one shared calendar on your own domain. Buying clicks belongs at the bottom of that list. A dollar of booking value moved off a platform and onto your own site is worth about twelve cents to you, because you keep the 15% commission and hand about 2.9% back to your card processor. On a twelve unit property selling around half a million dollars of room nights a year, one percentage point of booking value moved direct is $617 a year.
| Step | What it costs to put in place | Share it has to move to pay for itself |
|---|---|---|
| Price one open week on both channels | An afternoon | Nothing |
| Write to the guests who already stayed | The message you already send at checkout | Nothing |
| Answer the telephone with the calendar open | Nothing, if somebody is there to pick up | Nothing |
| Fill in the Google Business Profile and turn on free booking links | An afternoon, plus whatever your vendor charges to send your rates to Google | Nothing |
| A direct rate the platforms never see | A setting, if your contract allows one at all | Nothing |
| A checkout and a shared calendar on your own domain | $480 to $2,148 a year in software | 0.8% to 3.5% |
| Being found in search and by assistants | Nothing to buy. Somebody has to write, for months on end | Nothing |
| Paid clicks | A fee on every click, for as long as you run them | Work it out again on every booking |
Where the twelve cents comes from
Twelve units at $180 a night, filled 65% of the year, sells 2,847 room nights and turns over $512,460. One percentage point of that is $5,124.60 of booking value.
Sent through a platform charging 15%, that $5,124.60 pays you $4,355.91. Booked on your own site, Stripe takes 2.9% plus 30 cents a payment, so at an average three night stay of $540 you keep $4,973.14. The difference is $617.23 a year for every point you move, or 12 cents in every dollar.
Your own gap may be wider than twelve cents for two reasons. Booking.com offered to handle the money for us at 1.1% to 3.1% on top of the 15%, and we said no. A property that accepted the same offer keeps less than 85% of a platform booking, so it gains more than 12 cents on every dollar it moves. Platform bookings also fall through more often. Cloudbeds, looking at its own customers, reported 21.8% of them canceled in 2025 against 10.6% of direct ones.
We run a group of serviced apartments in Vienna called MINT @Naschmarkt, so our own figures come in euros. Our direct guests pay €243 a night against €222 through the platforms, and part of that gap is that our platform rates carry the 20% loyalty discount we fund ourselves.
Run it on your own numbers before you use mine. Your room nights times your rate, times one percent, times twelve cents. The calculator does it for you if you would rather not.
The steps that cost an afternoon
These cost you time and nothing else. There is no subscription to earn back, and they work the same at eight units as at twenty five.
Price one open week on both channels, on the same afternoon. Count every tax and fee on both sides, and put the same number of children in the party each time, because the two channels do not always charge for them the same way. If your own price comes out higher, every other step on this page returns zero until you fix it, because you are paying to send people to the more expensive option. We failed this on our own property, and it took a guest walking away from us to make us run the test at all. The full version of it, and the rest of the free work, is written out step by step here.
Write to the guests who already stayed. Somebody who has already slept in one of your beds does not need to be found or persuaded, so the whole booking is yours apart from the card fee. Most properties already send a message at checkout and spend it on a thank you. Use it for one dated offer and a link that opens your own calendar. The longer version of that message is here.
Answer the telephone. A booking somebody rings in carries no commission, so it lands with the same twelve cents in it as one taken on your website. Whoever picks up needs your live calendar in front of them and the authority to hold a unit and take the card payment while the caller is still on the line.
Fill in the Google Business Profile. Current photographs, the unit types you actually rent, and a link that lands on a page where a visitor can pick dates. For a small property that listing carries more direct demand than the rest of your marketing put together.
Turn on free booking links. Google's Hotel Center documentation says clicks on them cost nothing, and that running a paid hotel campaign does not change where they rank. You need the Business Profile and your live rates inside Hotel Center, which for a property your size means your booking engine or channel manager sends them for you. Ask your vendor two things: is it a Google connectivity partner that can send your rates, and what does that add to your monthly bill. The answer to the second is the only part of this step with a price on it.
How far a direct discount can go
You can also set a lower price on your own site. The commission decides how far down it can go: a 15% commission leaves you 85% of the price, so once card fees come off you have about 12 to 13 points of room before the direct booking is worth less than the platform booking it replaced. The other cases are worked through here.
Our own margin is wider, at about 30%, for a reason that will not apply to you. We pay for a 20% platform loyalty discount on top of the 15% commission, so a platform stay leaves us about 68% of list instead of 85%.
Before you publish any rate, read the parity clause in your Booking.com contract. In the US and Canada it entitles Booking.com to the same or better price, conditions and availability than you offer anywhere of your own, your website and your front desk included. The single exemption is a closed member rate: guests opt in, sign in with a password, have already booked with you once as a member, and the price is never on public display. Our own 25% direct rate is visible to anybody who lands on the site, because Austrian contracts lost that clause under European law. A US or Canadian contract still has it, so the same rate would breach yours.
What the software costs, in points of direct share
Software is where the cash actually goes, so measure it the way you would measure any other purchase: in how much of your booking value it has to shift before you are square. Here are the published prices converted into points of direct share on the twelve unit property above.
| System | Published price at one property | Points it has to move |
|---|---|---|
| OwnerRez | $40 a month for the first property, then $15 down to $2 for each one after | 0.8 |
| eviivo | From $50 a month, with extras priced per room | 1.0 |
| Lodgify | $14, $26, $42 or $62 a month billed yearly, or $18 to $77 billed monthly | 0.3 to 1.5 |
| SiteMinder | $135 a month at five rooms, $179 with a booking engine | 2.6 to 3.5 |
| Little Hotelier | $39 a month plus 1% of booking value | 9.1 |
| Guesty | $9 a month plus 1% a reservation on Lite, which is sold for one to three listings; four and up is quoted | Not available at your size |
Vendor pricing pages checked on September 2026, except SiteMinder and Little Hotelier, checked on August 2026.
A flat $480 a year is covered by moving 0.8% of your bookings direct. A fee set as 1% of booking value works differently, because it is charged on all $512,460 the property sells, platform bookings included, which is $5,125 a year on top of the $468 subscription. That property has to move nine full points before it is square. Ask every vendor the question its pricing page skips: what do you take off a booking my own website generated, and do you take it off the platform bookings too. The fifteen other systems and what they publish are priced out here.
At every one of those prices there is a moment where building it yourself looks cheaper, and we have tested that against our own books. The invoicing tool we pay for at MINT costs €240 to €360 a year. Writing our own was priced at eight to twelve days of engineering, after which we would have owned sequential invoice numbering, a seven year archive and tax compliance for as long as the company exists. We kept paying the €360 and we have never regretted it. Run the same comparison before you decide a $480 subscription is expensive.
One calendar across every channel usually arrives inside the same subscription, which is why it has no row of its own. What you are buying there is the absence of a problem. Ours had been reporting a whole apartment type as sold out whenever one unit inside it was taken, so for June 2026 we were showing 5 of 30 nights as bookable when 26 were free. A guest who sees no space on your calendar books somewhere else and has no reason to tell you about it, so the loss never shows up in anything you read.
What a paid click is allowed to cost
Paid clicks are the only step here that charges you again on every booking, so work out your ceiling and check it every month. Twelve cents of a $540 booking is $65, so all the clicks it takes to produce one direct booking have to cost less than $65 between them. At twenty clicks a booking, your ceiling is $3.25 a click. At fifty clicks a booking, the ceiling falls to $1.30.
Take that ceiling into any conversation about advertising your property. If the price you are quoted sits above it, say no and spend the time on the free steps instead.
What it moved for us
Across May, June and July the whole program took us from 3% to 13% of booking value coming direct, worth €20,649 through our own site and €3,097 of commission we never paid. Most of that arrived through Google search, which went from 73 to 414 clicks a month over the same period and took a year of writing to get there. The numbers and their caveats are on the results page.
When the arithmetic says do nothing
The free steps cost you nothing but time, so they are worth doing whatever size you are. The paid part is different, and we do not take work on at a property doing less than $350,000 a year of bookings, because below that the commission you save will not cover the software and the setup in the first year. Run your own version before you sign anything: your annual room revenue, times the share you think you can move, times twelve cents, against the first year of whatever you are being sold.
If you want somebody to run that sum with you on your own rates and your own commission, book a call.
