ECONOMICS
·
JUNE 2026
·
4 MIN READ
How much you're paying booking sites
Commission is a marketing cost when a platform finds you a guest. When the guest already had your number, it is a fee for not picking up.
Most operators have made peace with travel platform commission. It is treated as an acquisition fee for guests you would never otherwise have reached, and for a genuinely new guest that is fair and often worth paying.
But a meaningful share of platform bookings are not new guests at all. They are people who had already found you, already decided they wanted to stay with you, and picked up the phone to say so. When nobody answers, they do not abandon the trip. They open the app they already have on their phone and book the same room, at the same property, through an intermediary.
You did not lose the booking. You bought it back at a discount to yourself.
What the commission actually buys in that case
Nothing. The discovery had already happened and the decision had already been made. The platform performed no service other than being available at the moment you were not, and you pay the same fifteen to twenty percent you would for a guest who had never heard of you. That is not an investment, it is leakage, and it never shows up as leakage in your accounts. It shows up as channel mix.
The direct call is the cheapest booking you will ever take
Consider the same two night stay at one hundred and forty a night, so two hundred and eighty in total. Booked through a platform at eighteen percent, you keep roughly two hundred and thirty. Booked on the phone, you keep the full amount minus card processing, so around two hundred and seventy two.
The difference is about forty pounds or dollars on one reservation. It sounds small until you multiply it. Twenty such bookings a month is roughly ten thousand a year, and that is before you count the calls that produced no booking at all because nobody answered them.
The uncomfortable part
Travel platforms are not the villain here, and any vendor who tells you otherwise is selling something. They genuinely do generate demand you could not generate yourself, particularly without a marketing budget. The goal is not to eliminate them. Keep them for discovery, and stop letting them collect on demand you already created simply because the phone rang at an inconvenient moment.
What to do about it
Start by measuring it, because almost nobody does. Pull a month of call logs, count the enquiries that went unanswered, then check how many of that month's platform guests had also called you first. Your phone system can usually show this even when your PMS cannot, and the overlap is normally larger than expected. Then fix the cheapest gap, which is almost always overnight and the check in rush.
Commission rates and the worked figures above are illustrative. Use your own contracted rate and average nightly rate for a number that applies to your property.
Keep the bookings you already earned.
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