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The Direct Booking Playbook

Every channel you market on is rented.
Two are not.

Your own website and your own guest list. This is a guide to making both work harder, in the order that costs you least.

38 pages. No cost, no catch. Straight to your inbox.

Algorithms change. Ad costs rise. Platforms rise and fall.

Your website is the only place you sell a room without paying a commission on it. A guest who has already stayed with you is far cheaper to bring back than a stranger is to win.

Almost everything in this book serves one of those two facts.

What's inside

Eight fundamentals, one plan, and a way to tell whether any of it is working.

Most of the hotel marketing advice still circulating is five years old. It tells you to post eleven hashtags, open a Google My Business account and check Universal Analytics. None of those things exist in the form they did. This is a rewrite, not a reprint.

  1. Know who the room is for.

    Three guest profiles built from evidence you already hold, your booking data, your reviews and your front desk, then mapped against the ten worst weeks in your calendar.

  2. Treat your website as the front desk.

    Nearly 1 in 4 OTA bookings gets canceled, against 1 in 10 booked direct. The commission is only half the cost. The booking path, rate parity, and the three places independent hotels lose bookings over and over again.

  3. Be findable, including by the machines.

    Local search, your Google Business Profile, free booking links, and what to do about a search result that answers the question without ever showing your website.

  4. Be the best guide to your destination.

    The local knowledge you already have, published in a form guests actually want. Roughly eighty percent about the place, twenty percent about the property.

  5. Buy only the guests you cannot earn.

    Metasearch, brand search and retargeting, with an honest account of where the OTAs genuinely fit.

  6. Use the list nobody can take from you.

    Building it properly, and the five emails worth sending, including the win-back email most hotels never get around to.

  7. Run reviews like a department.

    A named owner, a seventy-two-hour reply standard, and reading reviews as operational data rather than as marketing.

  8. Know your five numbers.

    Direct booking share, cost of a direct booking, website conversion rate, repeat guest rate, and your review score alongside how recent it is.

Why this edition

Guests find hotels differently now, and the advice has not kept up. This edition is written for the way people actually search, compare and book today: in a search bar that answers before it links, on a phone, in short video, and increasingly through an assistant that will summarize your property without ever showing your website.

This edition adds dedicated guidance on reputation management and measurement, helping hotel teams connect their marketing activity to booking performance.

Frequently Asked Questions

No. The goal is not zero OTA bookings. Large platforms put you in front of travelers who would never have found you, and a meaningful number of them then search for your hotel by name and book directly. The book treats them as paid distribution with a known cost, and helps you work out which channel should own which guest.

How guests search, compare and book has changed, so this edition is a rewrite rather than a reprint. It adds dedicated guidance on reputation management and measurement, helping hotel teams connect their marketing activity to booking performance.

No. The first two weeks of the ninety day plan cost nothing, and they are the part that compounds fastest.

With the walkthrough. Ten checks, all of which you can do this afternoon. Closing a leak is cheaper than buying traffic to run past it.

Then do one. Nobody executes all eight at once, and the hotels that try usually finish none of them. Pick the leak costing you most, close it, measure it, then move to the next one.

It is. We would rather be useful first. Nothing in the book is held back to make working with us necessary.

So we can send you the e-book, and occasionally something else we think is worth reading. We do not sell your details, and you can unsubscribe in one click. Full terms are in our privacy policy.

Case Study

Not theory. Practice.

The Pinch Charleston, a boutique hotel in the heart of historic Charleston blending restored architecture with modern design, turned its local knowledge into a sales tool — not a brochure.

View case study

Start
with one.

Tell us where your bookings come from now, and where you would rather they came from. We will tell you honestly which part to start with, whether or not you work with us.

On Your Mark,
Get Set,