Direct bookings against commission: the arithmetic, and what we will not claim

A 360° tour is a one-time cost with no subscription behind it. Commission on a booking channel is a line that comes back every season for as long as the property trades. That is the whole shape of the comparison, and you can do it in five minutes with numbers you already have. What we will not do is tell you that a tour raises direct bookings by some percentage. We went looking for a credible figure for this industry and did not find one, so this post does not contain one.

The shape of the comparison

You can price the tour exactly: the rate card is published at pricing and you can multiply it against your own station count today, without speaking to anyone. It is paid once. There is no monthly platform fee behind it, no charge per view, and nothing that stops working if you stop paying us, because you are handed the files rather than an account.

The commission line is the opposite: you cannot pay it off, it scales with your success, and it is charged again next season on next season’s bookings. Those are different kinds of number, which is why the sum below uses your figures rather than ours.

Do the sum with your own numbers

1. Take last season’s gross through the channel

   One number, off your own statements: what you sold through the booking channel over one season. Not your total revenue — only what went through the channel that charges you.

2. Multiply by the commission rate on your own contract

   Your rate, from your own agreement, not an average from an article. That product is what the channel cost you in one season. We do not publish a commission percentage here because it varies by contract and by property, and we have not verified anyone’s.

3. Work out what one percentage point is worth

   Divide the first number by one hundred. That is what a single point of commission costs you per season, and it is the unit worth holding in your head when you compare anything to it.

4. Price the tour from the rate card and put the two side by side

   €40 for each of the first ten 360° photographs, €30 for each one after, VAT on top. Compare a one-time figure against a per-season one, over as many seasons as you expect to trade. The comparison is honest as long as you keep the recurrence visible on one side and absent on the other.

Why there is no percentage in this post

We went looking. Every booking-uplift figure we found led to a marketing page, or to a blog citing another blog. Never to a study we could open and check. That includes the ones published in this market, and the flattering ones. So we are repeating none of them. The statistics this industry repeats, and why we will not traces them one at a time, with what each one turned out to rest on.

We also do not measure your bookings, so we could not honestly claim a result even if the industry’s numbers were sound. What we can wire up, if you want it, is your own analytics on the tour — €0.50 per distinct connection, plus €50 once if you have no analytics property yet. That reports to you, on your property. It tells you what people looked at. It does not tell you what they booked, and we are not going to pretend the two are the same measurement.

What we can tell you, because we counted it

• Of the seventeen delivered tours published on this site, five are accommodation businesses: two hotels, an apart-hotel, a coastal campsite and a capsule hostel. Three more are places somebody eats, seven are individual apartments in one development, one is a shop and one is a university building.
• Hotel Nertili shows seven rooms by their own numbers and view categories rather than as a representative sample, so a guest being offered 303 can stand in 303.
• Fenix Apart-Hotel shows sixteen apartments, each by its own number, across four floors — 72 positions in one building.
• Hotel Moskva in Budva runs basement to third floor, with seven rooms shown by number and their bathrooms and balconies given their own positions.
• All three are live, public and ungated. Open one on a phone and it behaves the way your guest’s will.

Where the tour has to sit to matter at all

On the page where somebody decides — your own site, on your own domain, because you hold the files. In the reply you send to a direct enquiry, as a link rather than an attachment. And, if you want the panoramas visible where people search rather than only where you send them, published to Google Street View at €10 per panorama, choosing which ones go. A tour that lives only inside a platform you rent is working for the platform.

The longer version of this argument, with the full commission framing, is direct bookings against OTA commission. If you want the count and the price for your own property first, send the address.