Direct-booking programmes for independent hotels
Demand you already paid for never reaches your booking engine.
Enquiries arrive by email and phone and quietly go cold. Meanwhile the record the OTAs and the AI assistants read about you is out of date. We fix both — and publish you in FACES.
Prices are on this page. No forms to see them.
Before the prices, the part most vendors leave out
A shifted booking is not pure profit, and we will not pretend otherwise.
You keep the commission, minus any discount you give on your own site. That is the whole calculation — and it only applies to guests who would have come anyway, which is why we never tell anyone to leave the OTAs.
What a shifted booking is actually worth to you
Drag to match your property, or type exact figures from your own invoice. We do not publish market averages — your rate and your contract are what decide the answer.
Your numbers
Per room, per night, before tax.
The effective rate on your invoice, including any visibility programme.
Member rate or value-add you give on your own site. Zero if you give nothing.
Your volume
Bookable rooms.
Annual average.
Roughly what proportion of room-nights.
To cover direct demand programme, you would shift
54
room-nights a month
Judge for yourself whether that is reachable. We would rather you decided now than in month six.
- You keep, per room-night
- 66 CHF
- 94 CHF commission less 28 CHF discount
- Programme cost
- 3 500 CHF
- per month
How this is calculated▾
The saving on a shifted room-night is the commission you no longer pay, minus any discount or value-add you give on your own site, minus the small difference in card-processing cost.
We do not deduct your website’s fixed running costs. Those do not rise when one more guest books direct, and you are already paying us for that channel — deducting them again would bill you twice for the same thing.
The saving applies to demand that would have arrived anyway. It is not a saving on genuinely OTA-generated demand, which is exactly why we never recommend leaving the OTAs.
Three ways to start
One is buyable with a card. The other two get a conversation first, because we would rather turn down a property we cannot help than take its money for a month.
Distribution & Data Audit
1 500 CHF
one-time · delivered in 10 working days
Every place your facts are wrong across the OTAs, Google and the machine-readable record. Screenshotted, dated, and with the name of whoever can fix each one.
25+ rooms. Especially after a rebrand, renovation or award — or if nobody has ever checked.
- A dated screenshot of every defect, naming the exact field
- A correction packet per error, written and ready to send
- Mystery test of your reservations email and phone
- Rate comparison against the OTAs across five dates
- AI-visibility baseline on 30 prompts, published so you can re-run it
- Nothing materially wrong? We say so, and refund the fee
Credited in full against month 1 if you go further within 60 days — automatically, never on request.
Where most independents start.
Direct Demand Programme
3 500 CHF
per month · cancel any time
More of the demand you already earn books with you instead of a platform — measured in booking-engine revenue, against a baseline you countersigned.
Independent 4- and 5-star properties, roughly 30–120 rooms, with no in-house e-commerce team.
- A dated baseline you countersign in week one
- Month 1 builds the measurement — tracking, a rate code, call attribution
- Enquiry-to-booking rebuild: availability-aware form, reply SLA, quote-to-book links
- Google Business Profile rebuilt and maintained monthly
- Your schema kept in step with live prices
- Review programme run inside the platforms' rules
- Wikidata corrected, with the public diff handed to you
- One FACES feature a year, plus your curated listing live in 30 days
Flagship
7 500 CHF
per month · four properties at a time
The programme, extended to every system that describes you to the trade — with a senior lead sitting in your commercial meeting.
5-star and city-centre properties, and anyone whose rebrand the trade data has not caught up with.
- Everything in the programme, across up to two properties
- Trade-data corrections across all four GDS, wholesalers and bedbanks
- Rebrand consolidation, with every trade-off agreed before anything is touched
- Your awards written into every record that has a field for them
- Your feeder-market languages, human-translated
- Quarterly channel economics, read against your own invoices
- Up to four FACES features a year
- A named senior lead and deputy, one-business-day SLA
Four properties at a time. We hold the line even in a full month.
Cancel any time, in writing, effective immediately. No minimum term, no notice period, no auto-renewal. Twelve months prepaid saves 10% and is refundable pro rata.
Six jobs, each with something you can hold
Ordered by leverage rather than by tradition. Every one produces an artefact, not an activity report.
01
The enquiry channel nobody measures
A large share of hotel demand never touches a booking engine — it arrives by email, phone and contact form, with no availability check and no bookable link. In Switzerland, the best-measured market we have figures for, only about 18% of overnights come through the engine. That demand is already yours and already paid for. It is lost to slow replies, not to Booking.com.
What you get: Tracked enquiry volume, median response time, and enquiry-to-booking conversion — numbers that did not exist before month one.
02
The highest-traffic asset you own and are not maintaining
Most guests meet you on Google before they reach your site. Duplicate listings, wrong categories, missing attributes and unanswered reviews all hold it back — and none of it is visible from inside the hotel.
What you get: Google's own Business Profile performance reporting, monthly, alongside the review response log.
03
The data the machines read about you
Your channel manager pushes rates and availability — not your name, room count or amenities. Every platform keeps its own copy, and stays wrong until someone fixes it by hand. That stale record is what an AI assistant reads when a guest asks where to stay.
What you get: A tracked correction register: every wrong record, who owns it, when the packet was sent, when it was verified fixed.
04
Reviews, done in a way that cannot backfire
Every departing guest asked, unsegmented, at the right moment, through the platforms' own approved tools. No gating and no incentives — both breach policy, and the penalty lands on your listing rather than on ours.
What you get: Review volume, recency and rating per platform, with a documented response on every review.
05
Editorial and curation
Independents structurally lack the third-party footprint that chains buy with brand budgets. We own a magazine and a curated platform, so a feature and a listing are contractual rather than a PR agency's best-efforts — a PR retainer cannot promise placement, because it does not own a title.
What you get: A published feature with an agreed window, and a live listing. Both labelled as commercial editorial.
06
Speed and the booking path
A speed budget on the pages between interest and payment. Not a vanity score — the exact path a guest takes to reach Book Now.
What you get: Published Core Web Vitals from real-user field data, not lab scores.
Straight answers
Five things you should ask any vendor in this market. Here are ours, with what we do instead of promising them.
Can you guarantee we rank first on Google?
No. Google's own documentation says nobody can, and any vendor promising it is counting on you not checking.
What we do instead: We fix the technical and entity data that decides whether you can compete at all, and report the movement against your week-one baseline.
Can you make ChatGPT recommend us?
No. Model outputs are non-deterministic and the sources they cite change month to month.
What we do instead: We make sure what those systems read about you is correct and that your crawlers are not blocked, then track your mention rate on a fixed prompt panel you can re-run yourself.
Will you write our Wikipedia article?
No. Wikipedia's own policy is that paid editors cannot guarantee an outcome, and the reputational risk of a paid-editing investigation lands on you, not us.
What we do instead: We correct your Wikidata item — the same entity data feeding Knowledge Panels and AI answers — with no notability bar and a public revision diff as proof.
Can you get us to the top of Tripadvisor?
No. Guests and juries decide that, and we will not imply otherwise.
What we do instead: We run a compliant review programme through the platforms' own approved tools, so your volume and recency improve without risking a penalty on your listing.
Should we just leave the OTAs?
No, and we would talk you out of it. The best controlled study found independent hotels gained the most from being listed.
What we do instead: We shift the demand that was already yours onto your own booking engine, and leave the demand the platforms genuinely create where it is.
How we measure
Nobody in this market publishes a methodology. Here is ours, before you buy anything.
In week one we take a dated snapshot you countersign. Everything after that is measured against it, and the report arrives on the same date each month whether the news is good or bad.
Four deterministic sources
Booking-engine revenue carrying the programme’s own rate code — your till, not our attribution model. Tracked enquiry volume, response time and conversion. Google’s own Business Profile reporting. Published Core Web Vitals.
Two probabilistic ones, labelled as such
AI mention rate on a frozen prompt panel — run logged-out, repeated, reported as a range and never as a rank. And review volume, recency and rating.
The part no competitor publishes
There is no Search Console for AI answers. Cited sources churn heavily month to month. When a number drops because of noise rather than because of us, the report will say so.
Who this is not for
- Properties under 25 rooms — the arithmetic does not work, and we will tell you so.
- Chain-managed hotels where the brand controls the Google profile and distribution.
- Anyone who wants to leave the OTAs. That is not what this is, and we think it would cost you money.
- Anyone who needs a booking engine. We do not replace yours, and we will not be price-compared to one.
- Anyone whose owner will not release extranet and analytics access. Without it we cannot measure, and without measurement none of this is honest.
Questions we get asked
What does a hotel direct-booking programme actually do?
It moves demand you already earn onto your own booking engine, and corrects the machine-readable record the OTAs, Google and the AI assistants read about your property. In practice that means instrumenting the enquiries that arrive by email and phone, rebuilding your Google Business Profile, keeping your structured data in step with live prices, and correcting your entity data across the platforms that describe you.
How much does it cost?
Three fixed prices, published on this page and shown in your own currency: a one-time Distribution & Data Audit, the Direct Demand Programme monthly, and Flagship monthly. Nothing is quoted privately and there is no negotiated rate card. Programmes run month to month and can be cancelled at any time, and the audit fee is credited in full against the first month if you continue within 60 days.
Why not a cheaper monthly retainer?
Because the arithmetic has to work. At the day rates senior specialists actually cost, a four-figure retainer buys a handful of hours a month, and a programme of this scope delivered in six hours would be either junior work or undelivered work. The core programme is roughly 22 hours a month of senior time — a number we can state and you can hold us to.
How many bookings do we need to shift to break even?
It depends on your own rate, your commission and any discount you give on your own site, so the calculator on this page runs it on your figures in your own currency rather than ours. The method is the part worth knowing: the saving on a shifted booking is your commission, minus any discount you give on your own site, minus the small card-processing difference — and nothing else. At 17% commission with a 5% direct rate that is roughly 12% of your room rate. Divide the monthly fee by that and you have your answer.
Has Booking.com's commission actually been cut?
No. In Switzerland the federal Price Supervisor ruled Booking.com's commissions abusive on 20 May 2025 and ordered a cap, but Booking.com appealed so it is not in force, and it never applied outside Switzerland. The only rate that matters for your business is the effective rate on your own invoice.
Can you make ChatGPT recommend our hotel?
No, and nobody can — model outputs are non-deterministic and the sources they cite change month to month. What we can do is make sure what those systems read about you is accurate, that your crawlers are not blocked, and that your entity data is correct, then measure your mention rate on a fixed prompt panel and report it as a range rather than a rank.
Do we need an llms.txt file for AI search?
No, and we will not sell you one. Log analysis of sites that publish llms.txt shows the overwhelming majority receive zero requests for it from AI crawlers, so it is a file almost nothing reads. What does matter is that your real pages are reachable — that your robots.txt and your CDN are not silently blocking AI crawlers — and that the facts on them are correct.
Will you write our Wikipedia article?
No. Wikipedia's own policy is that paid editors cannot guarantee an outcome, and its notability standard for organisations excludes press releases, routine coverage and trade press — most of a hotel's evidence base. We correct your Wikidata item instead, which feeds the same Knowledge Panels and AI answers, has no notability bar, and leaves a public revision diff as proof.
We already have an agency.
Most of this is work an agency does not do: correcting OTA and travel-trade records, fixing entity data, and instrumenting the enquiry channel. Start with the audit — if your agency is already covering the defects we find, you will know within ten working days.
We are already 60% direct.
Then the commission argument is weaker for you, and we will say so. The enquiry-conversion work usually is not, because it applies to demand already coming to you directly. The audit tells us which is true for your property before either of us commits.
What happens if we cancel in month two?
It takes effect immediately, in writing, from your dashboard, with no notice period and no retention call. You keep the Google Business Profile, the Wikidata Q-ID, the schema, the rate code and a full data export within five working days.
Who owns the accounts and the data?
You do, throughout. We work inside your own accounts rather than parallel ones you would lose access to when the engagement ends.
Every figure on this page, and where it comes from
If we cannot source a number, it is not on this page. Several claims common in this market are missing here for exactly that reason.
- 01Booking.com's Swiss commissions ruled abusive; cap ordered at a weighted average of at most 10.3%
Preisüberwacher (Swiss Price Supervisor), Verfügung against Booking.com B.V., 20 May 2025 — source
Under appeal at the Federal Administrative Court, not in force, and Swiss-only. The cap is a weighted average across that market, not a rate any individual hotel pays. - 02Roughly 18% of Swiss hotel overnights arrive via a real-time booking engine, ~19% by email and ~14% by phone
HOTREC / HES-SO, European hotel distribution study (n=3,089, reference year 2023), 2024
Swiss subset of a European study. Quoted as evidence of the pattern, not as a claim about your property — we measure your own channel split in week one. - 03Nobody can guarantee a #1 Google ranking
Google Search Central documentation - 04No special structured-data markup is required for Google's AI features
Google Search Central documentation
Which is why we sell schema as data and price correctness rather than as an AI ranking lever. - 05Paid editors cannot guarantee a Wikipedia outcome; organisation notability excludes routine and trade coverage
Wikipedia policy: WP:PAID, WP:COI and WP:NCORP - 06Independent hotels gained the most from OTA listing (the billboard effect)
Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, controlled study
The reason we never recommend delisting.
Start with the audit
Ten working days, 1 500 CHF, credited in full against month 1 if you go further. If we find nothing materially wrong, you get the fee back.