How to get more direct bookings for your hotel

Booking sites are good at finding guests who have never heard of you, and that is worth their commission. The bookings to win back are the ones from guests who already knew your name: they searched for your hotel, saw a booking site first and booked there. That is commission paid on a guest you had already won.

• Guests who searched your hotel's name on Google and booked through a booking site's advert or price.
• Returning guests who booked again on the booking site where they first found you.
• Guests who called or wrote with a question, were told to book online, and booked on a booking site.

A guest who sees your website and a booking site side by side books where it is cheaper. Search your hotel's name on Google, open the prices, and compare your own website with each booking site for the same room, the same night and the same cancellation terms.

• If a booking site is cheaper, find out why before anything else: a price for its signed-in members, a price for its app, or a rate you gave a travel agent that has been passed on.
• Give your own website something the booking sites don't have: breakfast included, a later checkout, or a better room when one is free. A guest sees the difference without a lower price.
• Read your contract with each booking site before you lower your own price.

What a contract may ask depends on where you are. Booking.com's own rules differ by country: in some a hotel has no duty to match its prices elsewhere, in some it must not sell for less on its own website, and in others not anywhere online. In India, the Competition Commission ruled in October 2022 that MakeMyTrip-Goibibo had broken competition law, among other ways by making hotels keep their prices and rooms on other sites no better than on its own, and fined it.

When a guest searches your hotel's name, booking sites often appear above your own website, in adverts and in Google's list of prices. Three things put your own website in front of them:

• Your Google listing, with your own website's address in it rather than a booking site's.
• Your own price in Google's list of prices. Google lists it free of charge once your booking engine sends it, and marks one link for each hotel as its official site, never a booking site's (see the guide on Google's free hotel listings).
• Your website's own title, saying your hotel's name and town, so that Google shows it for that search.

Most guests look at a hotel on a phone. If your price appears only after several screens, or the booking page is slow, they go back to the booking site's app, where they are already signed in.

1. 1Open your own website on a phone, on mobile data rather than the hotel's wifi.
2. 2Pick a night two weeks away and book a room up to the payment page, timing it.
3. 3Note every step that asks for something a booking site doesn't: an account, a code, a long form.
4. 4Check the ways to pay. In India a guest expects UPI as well as cards.
5. 5Fix the slowest step first, then try again.

• Ask for an email address or a WhatsApp number at checkout, with the guest's permission, and keep them.
• Send past guests a reason to come back that is only on your website, at the time of year they came.
• Tell guests at checkout that booking direct next time gets them the better room or the later checkout.

A guest who booked through a booking site is still your guest once they arrive. The stay is your chance to make the next booking a direct one.

Each month, count the bookings from each source: your website, phone and walk-in, and each booking site. Your property management system or channel manager can usually list them. Watch the share that came direct, not only the number, and the commission you paid that month. One month says little; three in a row show the direction.