Direct bookings against OTA commission: where a tour actually sits

Commission is a percentage of revenue, charged for as long as you take bookings through that channel. A tour is bought once and the files are yours afterwards. That is the whole comparison, and it can only be done with your own contract open in front of you — we will not print a commission rate, because no rate we found would be reliably true of your property. What a tour changes in that decision is narrow, and worth stating precisely.

The one number we will not print

Every article you will read on this subject opens with a commission percentage. We went looking for one we could stand behind and did not find a primary source we could put a link and a date against. The figures that circulate are quoted second-hand, they differ from each other, and none of them is your contract. A single headline rate is therefore either wrong for most readers or right by accident, so we are not printing one.

So this post does not have one. The number you need is on your own contract and on your own statements, and it is a better number than anything we could publish, because it is actually yours. Everything below is written to be usable with that figure rather than instead of it.

The arithmetic, with your own numbers in it

1. Find the real rate on your own contract

   Not a headline one from an article. Read your own agreement and your own statements: whether any visibility or preferred-partner programme you are enrolled in is billed separately from the base rate, and whether the rate applies to the room only or to extras as well. Those are questions for your contract, and we are not in a position to answer them for you.

2. Multiply it by the revenue that actually arrives through that channel

   One season, not one booking. Use last year’s figure if you have it. This is the recurring line.

3. Price the capture from the published rate card

   €40 for each of the first ten 360° photographs, €30 for each one after that, a €160 minimum, VAT on top. Count the positions in your property — room types, public areas, the arrival route — and you have the shape of it. The full card is on pricing.

4. Add the extras you would actually buy

   Most hotels buy none. The ones that come up are descriptive photographs at €10 each, publishing selected panoramas to Google Street View at €10 each, and a second language layer built over the same capture at €100 per language.

5. Compare a recurring line with a one-time one

   That step is yours. We publish our rates and we publish our counts; we do not do this multiplication for you against a real building, and we do not publish what any client’s job came to.

What a tour actually changes, and what it does not

What it can change

It puts the specific room a caller is asking about in front of them, on your own domain, with no app to install. It gives your own booking page something the listing channels structurally do not carry. It gives a receptionist a link to send instead of a description to improvise.

What it cannot change

It does not bring anyone to your site. Distribution is a separate job and we do not sell it. If the only route a guest has to your property is through a listing, a tour on your own page is a page nobody reaches.

What it does not prove

We do not see your booking data. We will not tell you a tour raises direct bookings by any percentage, because we have not measured it and nobody in this field has published a figure that survives being checked.

What it removes

One reason a guest goes back to a listing site: to look at the photographs. That is a real mechanism and it is the honest version of the claim. Whether it is worth a season of commission is your arithmetic.

A tour only helps direct if direct already works

1. There is a booking path on your own site, it is visible above the fold on a phone, and it takes a date range without three clicks of preamble.
2. Somebody answers. Direct enquiries arriving by email or message need a reply the same day, in season. A tour raises the number of people who consider contacting you, which is only useful if contacting you works.
3. Your direct rate is not worse than your listed rate. If it is, the tour is doing marketing for the channel you are trying to reduce.
4. The tour is linked from where people land, not buried on a page reached from the footer. It is a folder of files you own and it can sit anywhere on your site, including the room page it belongs to.

Where else the panoramas go

The same capture can be published to your Google Business Profile — Street View publishing is €10 per panorama and you choose which ones go, which is rarely all of them. That is a different surface from your website: it puts the inside of the property into search and maps, where somebody is looking for a hotel in your town rather than for you specifically. It is also, deliberately, not something you own in the way you own the folder, which is covered in Street View is not your tour.

What eight delivered hospitality tours contain

What it would take for us to publish an uplift number

A named client, a measured before and after with the method stated, and their written consent to publish it. If that ever arrives, it goes up with their name on it and the method printed beside it. Until then this post ships without a conversion figure, which is the only honest version of it — and, judging by the rest of this field, the rarest.