A platform takes its commission out of every booking it sends you. Getting that same guest to book with you instead takes work, and the order of the work matters. Your own website has to take dates and a card without handing the guest to somebody else's checkout. Your Google Business Profile has to be filled in properly, because for a small property that listing is where the direct demand already is. People need a reason to come to you that has nothing to do with the rate. Contacting the guests who already stayed costs you nothing. After all of that comes the direct price itself. How far you can take it down depends on what a platform stay actually leaves you, which for most properties is somewhere between about 68% and 85% of the list price, depending on whether they also fund the platform's own loyalty discount.
- Open your own website on your phone, press Book Now, and try to book two nights next month. Note the first thing that stops you, and fix that before anything else on this list.
- Price one open date range twice on the same afternoon, once on your own site and once on your platform listing, with every tax and fee counted. If your own price is the higher one, fix that before you spend a dollar on traffic.
- Fill in the Google Business Profile: current photos, the room types you sell, and a link that opens your availability calendar.
- Call your own number at seven on a Saturday evening. See who picks up and whether that person can hold a room.
- Write to the guests who stayed with you last year. Send them a single offer with a link, instead of a newsletter.
- Set the direct rate last, and only after you have done the sum further down this page.
Can a guest actually book on your site right now?
On some properties the booking page looks like the rest of the site, and on others it opens as a separate window belonging to a software company your guest has never heard of, so find out which one yours is before you spend anything sending people to it.
Press your own Book Now button and go all the way to the card form. Does the address bar still carry your name when you get there, or has your guest been handed to a checkout with somebody else's name on it? Try putting two rooms into one booking. Look at what a visitor from Chicago sees, and whether the price is in dollars. Then read the first number on the screen, which has to be the whole number, cleaning fee included. The FTC's rule on unfair or deceptive fees has covered short term lodging since May 2025, your own booking site included, and the total price with every mandatory fee in it has to be shown more prominently than any other price. Tax can sit outside that figure as long as the guest sees the final amount before paying.
Our own place is MINT @Naschmarkt in Vienna, 18 serviced apartments in five apartment types. Austrian contracts are looser than American ones on price, which shows up in the arithmetic below. The way a booking page takes a guest's money is the same in every country. In May an American family of five asked us for a week in two apartments. They could not do it. Our booking page only took one apartment at a time, so they would have had to book the first, start again, and hope the second was still free. The prices were in euros and they were converting in their heads. They gave up, checked Booking.com, found the same week cheaper there, and booked it. I only know any of this because the father said so in a WhatsApp message. The currency switcher went up that afternoon. A guest now sees the price in their own money, and the charge still goes through in euros. The cart that holds more than one apartment followed a few weeks later.
Losing them sent me to check something I had assumed for a year. We took one open week, priced it on our own site and on our Booking.com listing the same afternoon with every tax and fee counted, and we failed our own test. The identical stay came to €1,000.34 direct and €756 through Booking.com. The lodging tax was being added twice. Nobody notices that until two totals sit side by side. Our own booking system was also billing €150 for a child as an extra guest, which the platforms never do. Both were settings we had entered ourselves, and we corrected them the same day. Neither would have come to light without putting the two prices side by side.
Run that test on your own property before you work on anything else here, and repeat it whenever a fee or a tax rate changes. The full version of it is here, with what a pass and a fail look like.
Count the card fee as part of what a direct booking costs you. Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents on a domestic card, another 1.5% when the card was issued abroad, and 1% more if you show the guest their own currency and convert it. Vendor pages checked on August 2026.
Your Google Business Profile is the cheapest direct channel you have
For a B&B or an inn, the listing that comes up when somebody searches your town is where most of your direct demand already is. Filling it in costs an afternoon: current photos, the room types you actually sell, opening hours that are true, and a link that lands on the page where a guest picks dates.
Google also runs free booking links. Its Hotel Center documentation states there is no cost for clicks on them, and that running a paid hotel campaign makes no difference to how they rank. To appear you need the Business Profile and your live rates inside Google Hotel Center, which for a property your size means your booking engine, channel manager or property system sends them to Google for you. Ask your vendor two questions: can you send my rates to Google, and what do you charge for it. If the answer is no, the profile and the link to your own booking page still work, and the free links wait until you change systems.
Reviews sit on the same listing and they are the reason a stranger clicks you instead of the place two streets over. Send the same request to every guest who checks out. Google's own policy forbids discouraging negative reviews or selectively soliciting positive ones, and it forbids pressing a guest for a review while they are still standing in your hall.
One more thing belongs on your own domain in plain text: your rates, your unit types and your cancellation terms. Google says a page needs nothing special to be quoted inside its AI answers beyond being indexed and eligible for an ordinary search result. An assistant answering a traveler's question about you is reading pages that already exist.
American travelers are moving your way while you do this. SiteMinder's Changing Traveller Report, covered by LODGING Magazine in November 2025, put the US direct booking share at 40%, up from 36%, against a global average of 28%.
What makes a guest book with you when the price is the same?
In the US and Canada your Booking.com contract limits the rate you are allowed to publish on your own site, and the only exception is a rate guests have to sign in to see. You can try the telephone, a package, a gift certificate or your own past guests without spending anything. Cloudbeds, looking at its own customers' bookings, reported that 21.8% of platform bookings were canceled in 2025 against 10.6% of direct ones, so a direct guest is also likelier to turn up.
A booking taken over the telephone carries no commission. Somebody who rings to ask about a cot, a late arrival or three rooms for a wedding has already decided to come. Whoever picks up needs the live calendar in front of them and the authority to hold a room and take a card on the spot. Type that card into the same system your website uses, so the booking and the money end up in one place. If that call goes to voicemail at seven on a Saturday evening, the guest books on a platform instead, and nothing in your reports will ever show that the call came in.
Mews recommends free breakfast, an early check in or a seasonal package as the reason to come to you instead, which leaves your published rate exactly where it is. The same page notes that breakfast, parking and a late checkout sold on your own checkout page keep revenue that often gets lost when the same guest books through a platform.
A gift certificate puts money in your account months ahead of the stay. Whoever redeems it books through your own site and leaves you an email address. Most small properties sell a few at Christmas and then forget the page exists by March.
Returning guests are the one group you can reach without paying anybody for the introduction. In a BiggerPockets thread on whether a direct booking site is worth it, the reply everyone upvoted puts it harder than I would: "you will not win the SEO war with airbnb/vrbo, so you have to drive people to your site. Repeat guests are the low hanging fruit for this." An operator two posts down built a site, sent nobody to it, and canceled the subscription a year later. We put our own rebooking offer into two messages that were already going out to guests, and what to put in them is here.
Chase the near misses as well. Revinate, a hospitality software vendor, reported in July 2025 that the cart abandonment rate for hotels is 80%, and that emails sent after an abandoned booking convert around 10% of those guests against about 1% for an ordinary marketing send.
How deep can a direct discount go?
The number your direct rate has to beat is what the platform booking actually leaves you. Any loyalty discount you fund comes off your rate first, and the commission is then charged on the lower price the guest paid.
At MINT the platforms take 15% on every stay they send us, and on loyalty rates we pay for a further 20% off, which leaves us about 68% of list and puts us at the generous end of this range. A direct rate 30% below list still pays us more than that booking did. Take it to 40% below list and it does not.
Most properties have far less room than that, because most do not fund a 20% discount on top of the commission.
| The platform booking you are replacing | What it leaves you | Deepest direct discount that still beats it |
|---|---|---|
| Booking.com at 15%, where you also fund the 20% loyalty discount (ours) | about 68% of list | about 30% |
| Booking.com at 15%, funding only the 10% every Genius property gives | about 76.5% | about 21% |
| Booking.com at 15%, or Airbnb at 15.5%, with no loyalty discount funded | 84.5% to 85% | about 12% to 13% |
Card fees of 2.9% are already taken out of the right hand column. Find your own row before you set a discount. A 25% direct rate pays a property in the top row and loses money for one in the bottom row.
To do it on your own numbers: work out what a platform stay leaves you as a share of your list price, then divide that share by 0.971 to put the card fee back in. The gap between the answer and your full rate is the deepest discount that still pays you more. Our own 68% divided by 0.971 comes to 0.70, which is where the 30% comes from.
The inputs are worth checking on your own contract. Joining Genius means 10% off your least expensive and most popular room type whatever level you reach, and Booking.com's page on the program sets out the 15% and 20% as extras you can switch on at Levels 2 and 3. Airbnb publishes its side: under the single fee, 15.5% comes out of the host's payout for most hosts, and Airbnb says it is moving the remaining home hosts onto the same arrangement. Booking.com and Expedia publish no percentage for you at all. Booking.com's help center says the figure depends on your country, your property type and the agreement you signed; Expedia says the percentage for your market is shared during contracting. Platform pages checked on August 2026. The longer version of this arithmetic works through the other rows.
Rates configured in your property system get pushed out to every platform you are connected to, so a direct deal set there lands on Booking.com with your name on it. Ours lives in our own booking engine instead: a 25% House Rate with a switch, a ladder above it for longer stays, and a 30% cap on the two together so the deepest booking a guest can reach still sits inside what the commission pays for. We can show that rate to anybody who visits because our own contract sits under the European rule, and a US or Canadian contract does not allow the same thing.
Read the parity clause in your own contract before you publish any of this. In the US and Canada, Booking.com's wide parity entitles it to the same or better price, conditions and availability than you offer on your own website, your phone or your front desk. The one 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 rate is never shown to the public. The rule is different in Europe, where our own property sits. Booking.com dropped parity for a property's own website in Europe under the Digital Markets Act, so our House Rate breaks no clause in Vienna. Yours is stricter, and what you can and cannot do under it is worth twenty minutes before you advertise a rate.
Once the pricing was straight, direct went from 3% to 13% of our booking value across May, June and July, worth €20,649 through our own site in that quarter and €3,097 of commission we never paid. The full MINT numbers and their caveats are on the results page.
What the software costs
Once your own site is selling the same rooms as the platforms, every channel has to be looking at the same availability. Two systems working from different calendars will sell the same night twice. SiteMinder's channel manager page claims more than 450 distribution channels, a rate plan live on Booking.com in as little as 60 seconds, and 99.95% uptime. I treat that subscription as insurance. When two guests turn up for the same room, you refund one of them and spend the evening finding them a bed somewhere else.
We connect to the sixteen systems below and resell none of them. Four will not give you a price at all: Cloudbeds, ThinkReservations, ResNexus and Mews each send you to a form or a call. Three publish a number that will not settle your bill. Guesty's $9 is a limited time price for one to three listings, innRoad quotes an estimate of about $150, and Hostaway prices its website add on while quoting the system underneath it. The other nine print something you can budget against. Prices are monthly unless noted.
| System | What its pricing page publishes | What the page commits to |
|---|---|---|
| SiteMinder | $135 at five rooms, $179 with an engine | One property; more by quote |
| Cloudbeds | Nothing, on any of four tiers | No commission on its own engine; bookings from price comparison sites billed after the stay |
| Little Hotelier | $39 plus 1% of gross booking value, Pro $179 | Built for 1 to 30 rooms |
| Beds24 | 15.50 euros, no contract | No commission ever; 19 euros more for your own subdomain |
| Lodgify | $14, $26, $42 or $62 a month billed yearly, or $18, $33, $53 or $77 billed monthly, at one property | 0% booking fee on every plan |
| ThinkReservations | No names, no figures, a call | Engine styled to your site; ThinkWeb joins site and checkout |
| ResNexus | No figure, custom by units and season | Commission free engine included |
| Hostaway | Nothing, a quote flow asking your listing count | Site included; Pro $49 plus 0.5%; 1.8% charged to your US guests |
| Guesty | $9 plus 1% a reservation, a limited time Lite price for 1 to 3 listings; 4 to 199 by quote | Engine free to Guesty users |
| OwnerRez | $40 for the first property, then from $15 down to $2 for each one after it | No commissions, guest fees or per booking fees |
| Hostfully | Growth $15 a property, Pro $25 | Growth adds 1% on payments and 0.85% on direct bookings, Pro waives both |
| Hospitable | Essentials free, then $29, $59, $99 | Direct Basic 1%, Premium 4% plus 3% processing, top two plans only |
| Mews | Nothing, a form on three tiers | Engine on your own site in Advanced; developer access to build your own in Enterprise |
| eviivo | $50, or $125 multi property | Add ons per room, $0.50 a US booking, $0.75 in Canada |
| innRoad | No fixed price, an estimate of about $150 | Engine bundled in, pasted in as embed code |
| WordPress plugins | WooCommerce Bookings $249 a year, HBook $99 once then $55 | Booked and paid on your own site |
Vendor pricing pages checked on August 2026; Lodgify and OwnerRez rechecked in September 2026.
Then ask each one the question its pricing page does not answer: what do you take off a booking my own site generated? A percentage taken by your own software comes out of the same money the commission does, so count it alongside the subscription. Little Hotelier adds 1% of booking value. Hospitable's Premium direct plan is 4% plus 3% processing. Five of the sixteen take nothing at all on a booking you brought in yourself: Cloudbeds, Beds24, Lodgify, OwnerRez and ResNexus.
When to leave this alone for a year
The free steps above apply to a property of any size. The threshold applies to the paid part, meaning the software and the time it takes to set up. Our own figure for that sits at around $350,000 a year of bookings, the number we use with US and Canadian properties, and under it the commission you save will not cover the first year of the build.
Settle any disagreement between your systems about tonight's availability before you add a direct channel on top of them. If the same stay test says your own price is the higher one, deal with that before you buy a single click. Until you do, every visitor you pay for is being sent to the more expensive option. And if nobody at the property can say how many bookings came through your own site last month, start recording that before you change anything else.
If you want to walk through your own numbers with somebody who has done it, book a call and we will run the same stay test on one of your date ranges.
