Most hotels and lodges we speak to know their occupancy number by heart and have no idea what their booking mix is costing them. Occupancy is the vanity figure. The mix is the money.
Online travel agents charge 15 to 25 percent per reservation. Booking.com sits around 15 to 18 percent for most independents, Expedia runs 18 to 25 percent, and preferred placement programmes push the effective rate past 25 percent once you buy your way up the results page (Cloudbeds keeps a current breakdown by platform). A booking taken on your own site costs roughly 4 to 5 percent all in, counting payment processing, the booking engine subscription and a fair share of the marketing that produced it. That gap is the whole argument.
This is the playbook we use with hospitality clients in Kenya and the UAE to move the mix without walking away from the OTAs.
Run the commission maths on your own property first
Do this before you approve a single ad budget. Take annual room revenue, split it by channel, and price each channel at its real cost.
A 40-room lodge at KES 18,000 a night and 60 percent occupancy books about 8,760 room nights a year, or KES 157.7 million in room revenue. If 65 percent of that arrives through OTAs at an 18 percent commission, you are paying roughly KES 18.4 million a year for the privilege. Shift 15 points of that mix to direct and you move KES 23.7 million of revenue off commission. You save about KES 4.26 million in fees, spend about KES 1.18 million serving those bookings yourself, and keep roughly KES 3 million.
The same sum in Dubai, where citywide average daily rate ran near AED 701 in the first half of 2026 and the market holds about 152,000 rooms across more than 720 hotels: a 120-room property at 60 percent occupancy turns over about AED 18.4 million in rooms. Moving 10 points of mix to direct is worth roughly AED 239,000 a year in retained margin. That is a marketing manager, a photographer and a year of paid search, funded entirely by fees you stop paying.
Write your version of this number on one page. Every decision below gets judged against it.
Audit where bookings actually come from
Channel reports from your property management system will give you the split. Most operators are surprised by two things.
- The billboard effect is real and it is not free. A large share of guests find you on an OTA, then search your name and book direct. If your brand search results are not clean, the OTA keeps that booking and charges you for it.
- Repeat guests are booking through OTAs. If a returning guest still goes through Booking.com, you are paying 18 percent to reach someone who already knows you. That is a CRM failure, not a demand problem.
Pull three reports: bookings by source, bookings by device, and the share of your direct bookings that came from guests already in your database. The third number is usually the ugliest and the cheapest to fix.
Fix the booking engine before you spend on ads
Average hotel websites convert between 1.5 and 2.5 percent of visitors into bookings. Well-run independents reach 4 to 6 percent. OTAs convert at 12 to 15 percent because their visitors arrive ready to pay. You will not match an OTA, but doubling 2 percent to 4 percent doubles the return on every shilling and dirham you put into traffic.
What moves that number, in rough order of impact:
- Keep the booking flow on your own domain. Hard redirects to a vendor domain cost 1.4 to 2.1 percentage points of conversion, which on a 2 percent baseline is a loss of 70 to 100 percent.
- Show live rates and availability on the room pages, not behind a separate "Book now" screen.
- Cut the form to name, dates, guests, card. Every extra field costs bookings.
- Load in under three seconds on a mid-range Android phone on 4G, not on your office fibre.
- Price in the guest's currency. A Nairobi lodge quoting only KES to a London family is adding friction for no reason.
- Put a real phone number and a WhatsApp link on every page. In Kenya and the UAE a lot of high-value bookings still close in a conversation.
Give people a reason to book direct that is not a discount
Rate parity clauses limit how far you can undercut an OTA on the headline price, and a price war is a bad habit anyway. Value beats discount.
Things that work and cost you little: a guaranteed room type rather than "run of house", free airport or airstrip transfer, late checkout, a bush breakfast or spa credit, flexible cancellation the OTA rate does not carry, and a members-only rate behind a free sign-up. That last one is worth building properly, because it turns a rate advantage into an email list you own outright.
State the benefit on the room page, inside the booking widget, and in the confirmation email. Most properties bury it in a footer nobody reads.
Content that sells a room, not a mood
Hospitality marketing drowns in sunset photography. Guests book on specifics: what the room looks like at 7am, how far the game drive is, whether the wifi holds a video call, what the food is actually like, how the transfer from the airport works.
The asset list we build for a property is short and reusable:
- Every room type shot honestly, including the bathroom and the view from the bed.
- One 60 to 90 second property film plus six to ten vertical cuts for social and paid.
- An itinerary page per stay length. Three nights in the Mara, two nights in Diani, a 48-hour Dubai stopover.
- Answers to the questions your reservations inbox gets every week, written as pages rather than buried in a chatbot script.
- Seasonal availability written plainly, because "shoulder season" means nothing to a first-time visitor.
We took this approach with a Maasai Mara property and wrote up the full build in our Sarabi Savanna case study. The same content set works for a city hotel, and the restaurant side of the business follows the pattern we covered in social media marketing for UAE restaurants.
Paid search, metasearch and the brand term you are losing
Start with your own name. OTAs bid on hotel brand terms, and if you are not defending yours you are paying commission on traffic that was already looking for you. A brand campaign is the cheapest paid media a hotel can run and it is usually the first thing we switch on.
After that, in priority order:
- Google free booking links. Your rates show in the hotel panel at no media cost once your booking engine is connected. Plenty of independent properties in Kenya still have not done this.
- Metasearch on a cost-per-acquisition basis. Google Hotel Ads retired commission bidding, so model it as CPA and compare it honestly against the 18 percent you pay an OTA. If a booking costs you 10 percent through metasearch, it is still cheaper than the alternative.
- Retargeting on date abandonment. Someone who picked dates and did not pay is the highest-intent audience you will ever have.
- Source-market prospecting. For Kenya that means the UK, the US, Germany and, increasingly, the domestic market. Kenyan residents accounted for 45 percent of hotel bed occupancy in 2025, and total bed-nights rose 12.6 percent to 11.56 million while international arrivals grew 6.2 percent to 2.55 million. The Tourism Research Institute publishes the full sector numbers each year. Domestic demand is not a fallback any more.
Skip broad interest-based awareness campaigns until the first three are working. They spend fast and prove very little.
Measure three numbers, not thirty
Hospitality dashboards are usually 40 widgets nobody acts on. Track these monthly instead:
- Direct share of room revenue. The headline. Set a target of moving it 2 to 3 points a quarter.
- Cost per direct booking. All marketing spend divided by direct bookings, compared against your blended OTA commission per booking. If it is lower, spend more.
- Database size and repeat rate. Contacts you can email without paying anyone, and the percentage of stays coming from people who have stayed before.
Revenue per available room still matters for the board pack. It just will not tell you whether your marketing is working.
What to ask before you hire an agency
Hospitality has more marketing vendors than most sectors and a lot of them sell one channel. Questions worth asking:
- Will you connect and manage the booking engine and channel manager, or only send traffic to them?
- What is your target cost per direct booking for a property like ours, and when do you expect to hit it?
- Who shoots the rooms and cuts the video, and is that inside the fee or a separate line?
- Can you show a property where direct share went up, with the before and after channel split?
- Who owns the website, the ad accounts and the guest database if we stop working together?
That last question sorts the field quickly. If the answer is anything other than "you do", keep looking.
For our part, we handle the whole chain rather than one slice of it: brand and identity, the website and booking flow, photography and film, content and social, SEO, paid search and metasearch, and the reporting that ties all of it back to room revenue. We have built and run this for 25+ brands across 3 continents over 12+ years, with an average ROI increase of 340 percent across our client base.
If you run a hotel, lodge or camp and your OTA line item has been growing faster than your revenue, that is a fixable problem. Look at what we cover, then send us your channel split and we will run the commission maths on your property before you commit to anything.