The same room, sold twice, is worth two different amounts.
A room sold at 200 in your currency through your own site and the same room sold at 200 through a listing produce identical room revenue and completely different net revenue. The gap is the commission, and it repeats on every booking, every night, all year.
Commission commonly runs in the mid-teens to mid-twenties as a percentage, depending on the platform, the contract and whether the property takes part in preferred or accelerator programs. We will not name a rate for any specific platform, because the rate that applies to your property depends on an agreement we have not seen.
What we can do is arithmetic. For a mid-size property, total annual commission frequently reaches six figures. Against that, a search program costs a few thousand a year. The question is not whether the program pays for itself. The question is how small a shift in channel mix is needed before it does, and the answer is usually a very small one.
This is a channel mix argument, not an anti-OTA argument. Listings will remain part of the mix for almost every property, and they should. What changes is the ratio.
Put your own numbers in.
Nothing is sent anywhere. The arithmetic is shown in full underneath, and the assumption about how much volume moves stays yours to set.
You pay roughly
a year in OTA commission, in your currency.
Moving 15% of that volume to direct would keep
a year, in your currency.
The Platinum program is $325 USD a month, or $3,900 USD a year. At these numbers that is 19.8% of what you would keep.
These are illustrative projections based on figures you entered. They are not a forecast or a guarantee. Commission rates and channel mix vary by property and contract.
Four places direct demand is currently leaking.
- 01
Your own property name
Listings rank and bid for hotel names. A guest who has already chosen you searches your name and clicks a listing, and you pay a commission for a guest you had already won. Defending this is usually the fastest available gain.
- 02
Destination and neighborhood terms
Far larger than branded demand, and contested almost entirely by aggregators and metasearch. This is where the volume is, and where most properties have never competed at all.
- 03
Room type and amenity searches
Specific, high intent, and routinely unclaimed because nobody has written the page. A guest searching for a particular kind of room is much closer to booking than one searching a city.
- 04
Map surfaces and metasearch
These sit alongside classic organic results for a property and behave differently. Ignoring them means ceding the results that appear above everything else on a phone.
How a channel shift actually happens.
Nobody switches channel because they were asked to. They switch because your own page was the one that answered the question they were searching.
The work is therefore in two halves. The first is visibility: being present for the searches that happen before a guest reaches a listing, which means destination, neighborhood, room type and experience terms rather than your name alone. The second is the page itself, because sending demand to a page that does not convert simply moves the problem.
Neither half works without the other. Visibility with a weak page produces traffic and no bookings. A strong page with no visibility produces nothing at all. Programs that only build links, or only rewrite pages, tend to fail for exactly this reason.
- Win the searches that happen upstream of your property name, where the guest has not yet chosen
- Defend your property name, where the guest has already chosen and you are paying for the privilege
- Make the landing page answer the specific search rather than describe the property in general
- Feed the map and review surfaces that decide what appears first on a phone
- Report on what was delivered as well as what moved, so the two can be told apart
Where the margin goes.
What this looks like for a 45-room independent.
A 45-room independent property running 68% occupancy at an average daily rate of 145 in its own currency, with 45% of bookings arriving through listings at an 18% commission rate.
Against that last figure, the Platinum program at $325 USD a month costs $3,900 USD a year. The program is roughly a fifth of what the shift keeps, in a scenario using a shift assumption of 15 percent rather than an ambitious one.
Change any input and the conclusion changes with it, which is the point of doing it on your own numbers rather than ours. A smaller property with a lower rate reaches a different answer, and for some properties the honest answer is to start with a smaller plan.
These are illustrative scenarios built from the arithmetic on this page, not client results. The figures above are arithmetic applied to assumptions, not a forecast, not a guarantee, and not the result of a client campaign.
What it costs.
Month to month, cancel anytime, setup fee waived, dedicated account manager on every plan. Available as a monthly subscription or a one-time order. All prices in US dollars.
| Basic | Silver | Golden | Platinum Best value | Titanium | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $65 USD | $125 USD | $235 USD | $325 USD | $575 USD |
| One-time | $75 USD | $140 USD | $260 USD | $380 USD | $620 USD |
| Domains | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 4 |
| Keywords | 5 | 10 | 20 | 40 | 100 |
| Guest posts (DA 20+) | 5 | 10 | 20 | 30 | 50 |
| Web 2.0s (DA 50+) | 5 | 10 | 20 | 30 | 50 |
| Amplification links | 1,500 | 3,000 | 5,000 | 10,000 | 20,000 |
| Keyword research | Standard | Standard | In-depth | In-depth | In-depth |
| Premium indexing | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| On-page technical audit | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Content gap analysis | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Competitor traffic spy | No | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Toxic link check with disavow | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Turnaround | 8-10 days | 10-12 days | 12-14 days | 14-16 days | 16-18 days |
Our recommendation Platinum at $325 USD a month is the usual starting point for a single property pursuing a channel shift, because defending your name and competing for a destination at the same time needs more than 20 keywords. If your commission figure is small, start with Golden and grow into more.
- Dedicated account manager
- Month-to-month, cancel anytime
- Setup fee waived
- Every link delivered with a live, clickable URL
- You own the assets forever
- Available as a monthly subscription or a one-time order
Build the exact program in the builder, or send us the property and we will tell you what we would target and what we would not bother doing.
How the work runs.
The same five steps on every program, whatever the size of the property.
- 01
Market review
We look at your destination, your competitive set and where your demand currently comes from before we touch anything.
- 02
Keyword analysis
Destination, neighborhood, room type, amenity and experience terms, mapped against what you can realistically win.
- 03
On-page checks
Technical and structural work on the pages that have to convert, so the demand we send you has somewhere to land.
- 04
Authority build
Guest posts, Web 2.0 properties and amplification, every one delivered with a live, clickable URL you can open.
- 05
Report and refine
A monthly report you can check yourself, and a plan that changes based on what moved rather than what we hoped would.
Questions.
How does SEO impact hotel revenue?
SEO impacts hotel revenue mainly by changing where a booking comes from rather than by creating new demand. A room sold through your own site and a room sold through a listing produce the same room revenue but a different net figure, because one of them carries a commission and the other does not. Moving a share of existing volume from the first channel to the second raises net revenue without raising occupancy or rate.
Are you saying we should leave the online travel agencies?
No, and we would be suspicious of anyone who did. Listings deliver real volume, reach guests you will not reach on your own, and provide genuine exposure in markets where you have no presence. The goal is a better ratio, not abolition. Most properties we speak to want to move a modest share of volume, not all of it.
What commission rate should I use in the calculator?
Use what you actually pay, because we cannot tell you what that is. Commission varies by platform, by contract, by market and by whether you take part in preferred or accelerator programs, and rates that apply to one property often do not apply to another in the same city. As a general range, the industry commonly sits somewhere in the mid-teens to mid-twenties as a percentage.
Will this work if listings outrank us for our own name?
That is one of the specific problems this service addresses. Defending your own branded search is usually the fastest win available, because you have the strongest legitimate claim to that term and the least distance to close. It is also the cheapest volume to reclaim, since those guests have already decided to stay with you.
How much volume can realistically move to direct?
We will not give you a number, because anyone who does is guessing. The calculator on this page lets you set the shift yourself, from 5 to 40 percent, so the assumption stays yours. What we can say is that the arithmetic is unusually favorable in this industry: for most properties, even a small shift is worth many times the program fee.
Do you help with rate parity or contract negotiation?
No. Rate parity, distribution contracts and channel agreements are commercially and sometimes legally sensitive, and they belong with your commercial team or your lawyers. We work on search visibility, which is a separate problem with a separate solution.
What makes this different.
Every link comes with a live URL
You get a clickable address for every placement, so you can open it and confirm the work exists. That is the whole reporting standard, and it is rarer than it should be.
You own the assets forever
Placements do not disappear if you stop paying us. What we build stays yours.
Month to month, no contract
There is no minimum term and no cancellation penalty. If the work is not worth the fee, you stop.
We say no to the wrong plan
If your numbers do not justify a larger program, we will tell you to start smaller. The calculator on this site does that automatically.
No guarantees on rankings
We do not guarantee rankings, occupancy, booking volume or revenue, because no agency controls them. Be careful with anyone who does.
Delivered remotely, worldwide
We do not claim offices or staff in your market, because we do not have them. Search work has always been delivered remotely and our published results include clients outside the United States.
Where to go next.
Start with the arithmetic.
Send us the property and we will come back with what we would target, what it costs and what we would not bother doing. We reply within 24 hours on business days.