A direct booking discount pays for itself down to about 12 to 13% off your list price, once card fees are counted. The figure assumes the platform booking it replaces costs you a 15% commission and nothing else. If you also fund a loyalty discount on that platform, a 20% Genius band for instance, you can go to about 30% off and still come out ahead. Discount deeper than your own break even and the booking earns you less than the platform booking would have.
Your break even, by what the platform booking costs you
| What a platform booking costs you | What it leaves you | Deepest direct discount that still beats it |
|---|---|---|
| A 15% commission, or Airbnb's 15.5% host fee, with no loyalty discount funded by you | 85% of list, or 84.5% on Airbnb | About 12 to 13% |
| A 15% commission plus the 10% Genius discount you fund on joining | 76.5% | About 21% |
| A 15% commission plus a 20% loyalty discount you fund | 68% | About 30% |
Card fees taken at Stripe's published US rate of 2.9% plus 30 cents on a domestic card, checked on September 2026. The third row is the position at our own place, MINT @Naschmarkt in Vienna. Work out which row matches what your own platform bookings cost you before you use any of these figures.
The arithmetic, on one real stay
Take two nights at $220, so $440 on your own rate card.
A platform booking with no funded discount pays you 85% of that, which is $374. Sell the same two nights direct at 12% off and the guest pays $387.20, which after an $11.53 card fee leaves you $375.67, or $1.67 better than the platform. One more point of discount flips it. At 13% the guest pays $382.80, the card fee is $11.40, and the $371.40 you bank is $2.60 worse. Your break even on this stay falls between those two figures.
Now fund a 20% loyalty discount on the platform side. The guest there pays $352, the 15% commission is charged on that $352, and $299.20 reaches you. Sell direct at 30% off and the guest pays $308, the card takes $9.23, and you bank $298.77. The two land within fifty cents of each other, so 30% is break even on this stay.
Both sides of that comparison are before lodging tax. Booking.com says it charges no commission on local taxes such as city tax, and the tax you collect on a direct booking is money you hold for the city either way, so it drops out of the comparison. Who collects it on which channel is a separate question, covered in what occupancy tax is and who collects it.
The loyalty discount comes off your rate first and the commission is then charged on what the guest actually paid, so every point you fund drags the commission down with it and widens what you can afford to give away on your own site. What each platform charges, and how to find your own percentage when it is not published, is in the Airbnb host fees calculator page.
Why our number is 25% and our cap is 30%
Our own House Rate is a 25% discount for direct guests, calculated inside the booking engine we built for MINT, which is the software we now run as Fullstreak. A discount calculated in the property management system goes out to every channel that system feeds, which includes the platforms you are trying to undercut. Ours feeds Booking.com and Airbnb among others, so a long stay discount configured there would have ended up funding a cheaper platform stay for the same guest. We have never configured a single long stay discount in that rate engine, and we turned down the property management system's own long stay pricing for the same reason.
There is also a ladder of longer stay discounts, and the whole stack is capped at 30% of rent, raised from an earlier 10%. Discounts apply in a fixed order, House Rate first, then length of stay, then any promo code a guest is carrying, so even the deepest booking we sell still nets us more than the same stay would have through a platform. The single cap is the piece I would suggest copying. If each discount carries its own cap, a guest who qualifies for two of them can end up with a combined discount well past your break even, and no booking report will flag it.
If your own discount is calculated in the property management system today, the platforms already have it. The fix is to rebuild it inside your booking engine and switch the old version off. Choosing a booking engine goes through what to ask a vendor about where its pricing runs.
Before you publish that discount, if you are in the US or Canada
Our 25% goes to every direct guest because our property sits in Austria, where Booking.com removed parity under the Digital Markets Act. A property in the US or Canada is in a different position.
Booking.com's General Delivery Terms put the US and Canada in what it calls wide parity. In plain terms, Booking.com should get the same price or a better one than you offer anywhere else, and that includes your own website, your app, your phone line and your front desk. The same applies to the conditions you attach and the rooms you keep available. A discount any visitor can see and book in your own checkout counts as a lower price under that clause, whether or not it lives on your own website.
Booking.com's terms carve out one exemption, for a rate intended for a closed user group, and its definition sets four conditions: the guest actively opts in to become a member, the interface they use is password protected, they have completed a profile, and they have already made at least one prior booking as a member. The rate also has to stay out of public view. Make it publicly available anywhere, including on a comparison site, and Booking.com's terms say it is entitled to parity on that rate again.
The usual advice at this point is to hand direct bookers something extra like a free breakfast and leave the rate alone. Booking.com's own definition of rate parity covers "the same or better amenities and add-ons (e.g. free breakfast, Wifi, early/late check-out)" alongside the rates themselves. So a free breakfast published on your site for direct bookers is inside the same clause as a price cut.
The terms also cover a rate made publicly available on any third party platform, including a metasearch engine or a price comparison site. If your booking engine feeds rates into Google's hotel results or a comparison listing, your members rate can end up public without anyone deciding to publish it.
Booking.com partner terms checked on September 2026. Clauses vary between agreements and the ones you signed are what bind you, so read yours before you publish anything, and what parity does and does not allow covers how the three regimes differ. All of the above is Booking.com's published wording. Expedia sets its terms inside the agreement it signs with you, so check what yours says about the price you show on your own site.
If you are already running a public direct discount in the US or Canada and want to tidy it up without losing the bookings it brings, the terms leave you one route. Put the published rate back to list, rebuild the same benefit as a members rate that meets those four conditions, and invite your past guests into it by email. The platforms never see an email. Honor anything already booked. Expect a few weeks of thinner direct volume while the members list fills. Your own agreement is the authority here, and if the money at stake is material, have a lawyer read it.
A property booking less than roughly $350,000 a year will not save enough commission to cover what a direct channel costs to build properly in its first year. If that is you, take the arithmetic and leave the build for later.
Six things to check on your own numbers
- Read your commission percentage off last month's invoice or statement.
- Add any loyalty discount you fund on that channel, at the band you actually have switched on.
- Quote the same dates on your own site and on the platform, with taxes and fees in both, and note what each would deposit.
- Take your card rate off the direct side.
- Check which piece of software actually calculates your direct discount. If the answer is the property management system, the platforms are already reading it.
- Set one cap on the whole stack and write down the order the discounts apply in.
To run that across a year of your own bookings, the savings calculator does the same comparison. And if you would rather have someone go through the numbers with you, book a call.
