Stop paying commission on your own customers

Every booking that comes through a third-party platform arrives with a tax attached. For hotels and many service businesses, that tax is 15–25% of the transaction — taken before you have paid a single supplier or staff member. It is the single largest controllable cost most small businesses never put on a spreadsheet.

The maths nobody runs

Take a modest operation: 120 bookings a month at an average value of €95, with a 15% platform commission. That is €1,710 every month — over €20,000 a year — handed to an intermediary for the privilege of selling something you already own.

A direct booking platform that you own outright is a one-off build. The question is simply how many months of commission it takes to pay for itself. In the example above, a typical build pays back in under a year, and everything after that is margin you keep.

"But the platforms bring me customers"

Sometimes — early on. But there are two traps:

1. You never own the relationship. The platform owns the customer's email, their booking history and their next booking. You are renting access to your own guests.
2. The commission never ends. A marketing cost should taper as your brand grows. A commission scales up with your success. The better you do, the more you pay.

The healthy model is to use platforms as a top-of-funnel acquisition channel — and to convert those one-time customers into direct, owned, commission-free repeat business.

What "owning it" actually means

• A booking system on your domain, with your branding.
• The customer database in your hands, GDPR-compliant and exportable.
• Real-time availability, payments and confirmations — without a middleman.
• No per-transaction fee to anyone except your payment processor (a flat ~1.5%, not 15%).

Where to start

You do not need to replace every channel on day one. Start by giving direct customers a reason to book with you directly — then watch how quickly the commission savings fund the rest of the build.

If you want to see what that would look like for your numbers, the savings calculator on the Solutions page runs the maths live.