Moving guests who already knew the name off commissioned channels

The situation#

Five properties, healthy occupancy, and a commission line that grew with revenue.

The group's assumption was that intermediary bookings represented demand they could not otherwise reach, which is partly true and was hiding something. Nobody had separated guests who found the group through an intermediary's discovery surface from guests who already knew the name, searched for it, and landed on a commissioned channel because it ranked above the hotel's own site or simply offered a better booking experience.

Those are different customers with completely different economics, and the group was paying the same commission on both.

Attribution made the argument unresolvable. Marketing reported bookings from ad platforms; finance reported revenue from the property management system; the two numbers had never been reconciled, so every budget discussion was a disagreement about whose figures were real.

What we did#

Weeks 1–3 — fixed the measurement first. Before touching spend, we built the join between advertising spend, the booking record and the actual stay in the property system. Cancellations and no-shows removed, margin applied per channel after commission and payment fees. That produced the first number both teams accepted.

Weeks 4–5 — separated the cohorts. Brand-intent traffic split from genuine discovery traffic. Roughly a third of commissioned bookings came from guests searching the group or a property by name. That single figure reframed the engagement.

Weeks 6–10 — rebuilt the direct path. The group's own booking surface was slower than the intermediary's and asked for more information. Mobile-first, rate parity handled honestly, and a booking completable in well under a minute. Where the intermediary experience was genuinely better, we matched it rather than assuming brand loyalty would carry the difference.

Weeks 11–14 — reallocated and instrumented. Spend moved towards defending brand intent and towards the discovery segments that actually produced stays, with a weekly operating rhythm on margin-weighted return rather than booking volume.

Ongoing — guest communication. Pre-arrival, in-stay and post-stay messaging automated, which removed a meaningful share of front-desk enquiry volume and improved the direct-booking experience it was competing on.

Direct was not free#

Shifting bookings direct trades commission for acquisition cost, payment fees, support load and platform maintenance. We modelled the fully-loaded direct cost per stay against the actual commission rate before recommending any reallocation.

For this group it was a clear win on brand-intent traffic and a marginal one on some discovery segments, where the intermediary was genuinely cheaper than acquiring the same guest ourselves. We recommended keeping those, which meant recommending against the larger version of our own engagement.

What we would do differently#

We rebuilt the booking surface before fixing the rate parity policy.

For the first six weeks the direct channel was faster and better and occasionally more expensive than the same room on an intermediary, because rate management was still being handled manually per property and drifted. Guests who checked both — which in this category is most of them — found the direct price higher and booked elsewhere, which made the new surface look like it had underperformed.

It was a commercial process problem sitting underneath an engineering improvement, and we should have established it as a precondition rather than discovering it in the data. We now check the pricing and inventory policy before optimising any channel that competes on price.

Where it went next#

The group moved to an ongoing growth retainer with a weekly cadence on margin-weighted return. Two further properties joined the platform the following year.

The attribution layer has since been reused for a question the group could not previously answer — which channels produce guests who return — which is a longer-window version of the same join and is now shaping the loyalty programme.