What a direct booking website can and cannot do
A website will not empty the booking sites and it will not find guests on its own. Here is what it does do, and why that is still worth more than most owners expect.
· 3 min read · Northlight
Owners ask two opposite questions about a booking website. Some expect it to replace Booking.com within a season. Others expect it to sit there unvisited. Neither is right, and the useful answer is in the middle.
What it can do
Take the booking itself. A guest who has already decided to stay with you can choose dates, see the price and book, without an agent in between. That is the whole point, and it matters most for the guests who were always going to find you: the ones who came back, the ones a friend sent, the ones who searched for your name.
Put the money in your account. The guest pays through a payment gateway set up in your name. In Sri Lanka that means a local gateway such as PayHere, WebXPay or Onepay, because Stripe does not operate here. The money goes to you, never through us.
Keep the guest. A booking through an agent gives you a name and a masked email address. A booking on your own site gives you the guest: their real address, their dates, and a way to ask them back next year.
Show the property properly. An agent’s listing is a tile among hundreds, in the agent’s colours, beside your competitors. Your own site has the whole screen, your photographs at full size, and nothing else for the guest to click on.
What it cannot do
It cannot find guests on its own. A new website is not visited until something sends people to it: your Google listing, your Instagram, the card in every room, the message to last year’s guests, and the guests who see you on Booking.com and then look for you by name. A site that nothing points to is a brochure in a drawer.
It will not replace the agents. For most properties the booking sites will remain a large share of the year, and they should: they reach guests you would not. The aim is to stop paying commission on the guests who did not need an agent, not to leave the agents.
It does not keep your calendars in step by itself. If a room is booked on your site, it has to close on Booking.com and Agoda too, or the same room can be sold twice. On a small property the owner can do that by hand. On a busy one, a channel manager does it automatically. We explain how in how a channel manager works.
What has to happen around it
Three things decide whether a direct site earns its keep: the photographs are good enough that a guest wants to book, the site is fast on a phone over mobile data, and the guests who already know you are told it exists. The first two are our job. The third is a habit: the link in your WhatsApp profile, on your Google listing, in every confirmation and on the card by the bed.
Do those, and the number to watch is simple: of the guests who already knew your name, how many booked with you instead of through an agent. That is the money a direct website is built to keep. Our commission calculator shows how large it is for your property.
