If you run a small property, the chances are that most of your bookings arrive through online travel agencies, the OTAs. It works. The platforms bring guests you could never have reached on your own, the bookings keep coming, and you pay a commission on nearly every night you sell.<\/p>\n\n
That arrangement has a name worth saying out loud: you are renting your demand, not owning it. The visibility, the terms and, in a real sense, the guests belong to someone else, and they can change without asking you. The answer is not to leave the OTAs. It is to run a booking channel of your own beside them, and to make it the one everything else follows.<\/p>\n\n
None of this is a complaint about the platforms. It is how the arrangement works, and worth seeing plainly before you decide how much of your business should rest on it.<\/p>\n\n
Commission on every night<\/strong><\/p>\n\n Every booking that arrives through an OTA pays its commission, whoever the guest is. That includes the couple who stayed last summer and searched for you by name, and the family whose friends recommended you. The platform did not find those guests, but the booking went through it, so the fee is the same.<\/p>\n\n A ranking you do not control<\/strong><\/p>\n\n Where your property appears in search results is decided by the platform’s own algorithms. On the large platforms the ranking is personalised for each traveller, weighs its factors differently for every search, and is tested and changed continuously. You can influence it through your prices, your reviews and the platform’s own visibility programmes, but you cannot see exactly how it works or decide when it changes. When bookings slow down, it is hard to tell whether demand fell or your position did.<\/p>\n\n Terms you do not set<\/strong><\/p>\n\n The commission rate, the way it is charged and the rules of each programme are written by the platform, and it changes them when it decides to. You can accept the new terms or stop selling there. For a property that takes most of its bookings through one platform, the second option is not really available, and that is the point.<\/p>\n\n The guest belongs to the platform first<\/strong><\/p>\n\n When a guest books through an OTA, the platform holds the relationship. The guest’s email address often reaches you as a relay address rather than their own, and you are expected to write to them through the platform’s inbox. That is a sensible protection for travellers, but it means the person who slept under your roof is, on paper, the platform’s customer. Asking them back next year is not as simple as sending an email.<\/p>\n\n The account is not yours<\/strong><\/p>\n\n Your listing lives inside an account that exists under the platform’s terms. Listings can be paused or suspended, and while they are, they do not appear in search and cannot take new bookings. Most properties never face that. But if most of your bookings flow through one account, that account is a single point of failure, and it is worth knowing what you would do the week it stopped.<\/p>\n\n You do not need an industry average for this. Your own figures are better. Take last year and work through three steps.<\/p>\n\n Now the question that matters. Of the guests behind A, how many had stayed with you before, came because someone recommended you, or searched for your property by name? Your reservation list will tell you roughly. That share of C is the part a channel of your own can win back.<\/p>\n\n The rest of C is not wasted. A commission on a guest who discovered you through a platform is often a fair price for a customer you could not have reached alone. Paying it again for a guest who already knows you is the avoidable part.<\/p>\n\n For a small property, leaving the OTAs is rarely the right move. They are very good at discovery: a traveller who has never heard of your town, let alone your guesthouse, can find you there in a few taps. Most small properties need that.<\/p>\n\n What they do not need is to pay for the same introduction twice. It helps to think of two different sales:<\/p>\n\n The first sale belongs on the OTAs. The second belongs on a channel you own. The platforms bring you new guests; your own channel keeps them.<\/p>\n\n A direct channel is more than a website with your phone number on it. It needs three things, and a small property can have all three without a revenue manager or an IT department.<\/p>\n\n 1. A website a guest can book on, not just enquire on<\/strong><\/p>\n\n The guest who looks you up has already decided they like you. The worst thing your website can do is make them work for it: a contact form instead of a price, “email us for availability”, a page that does not fit on a phone. Each of those sends the guest back to the platform, where booking takes a minute. A direct channel needs live availability, a clear price for the dates the guest chose, a way to pay or leave a deposit, and a booking form that works on a phone and in the guest’s language.<\/p>\n\n With Solidres:<\/strong> Solidres is a booking engine that runs on your own Joomla website, so the booking happens on your domain and the reservation is stored in your own database. Pay Later and Bank Wire are built in, PayPal comes with every paid subscription, and card gateways for other countries and banks are available as separate plugins in the Solidres payment gateways directory<\/a>. It is multilingual out of the box.<\/p>\n\n No website yet? You do not have to start from a blank page. Five Solidres templates, Lumina, Greenery, Infinity, Emerald and Orient, come with the Bundle, Hub and Developer subscriptions, and each has a quickstart that installs a copy of its demo site for you to make your own. Try all five on the Solidres live demo<\/a> and pick the one that suits your property, or read what makes Lumina, the newest of them, different<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n 2. One inventory, shared with the OTAs<\/strong><\/p>\n\n The moment you sell the same rooms in two places, both places need to know what is left. If they do not, one of two things happens: you take a double booking, or you get nervous and stop selling on your own website, which quietly hands every booking back to the platforms. So you need one inventory that the website and every OTA read from, held by your own channel, with the OTAs following it rather than your website hanging off someone else’s dashboard. A calendar (iCal) link can pass blocked dates between systems for a very small set-up, but it carries no prices or restrictions, and it only updates when the other side next checks it.<\/p>\n\n With Solidres:<\/strong> the Solidres Channel Manager<\/a> connects your Solidres site to Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, Agoda and Vrbo, plus a long list of regional and niche channels, and Solidres stays the master of your inventory. Availability is calculated from your real rooms, minus confirmed reservations and blocked dates, so your own website and every channel are selling the same rooms. You connect your own OTA accounts, so the contracts stay yours, and we take no commission on any booking. Channel restrictions let you stop selling on the OTAs on the dates that would fill anyway, such as a festival, a conference or high season, while your own website keeps taking bookings commission-free. The Channel Manager is a subscription of its own and needs a Solidres subscription alongside it, because the prices, stay lengths and blocked dates it sends to your channels are built in Solidres.<\/p>\n\n 3. A reason to book direct<\/strong><\/p>\n\n A guest who can book the same room at the same price in two places will usually pick the one they already use. Give them a reason to choose yours, and make it value rather than a lower price: breakfast or parking included, more flexible cancellation, a returning-guest offer, a better room when one is free. Whether you may also offer a lower price on your own website depends on your contract and on the country you are in, so check your own terms before you do.<\/p>\n\n A reason only works if the guest can find you again, so put your website address on everything you hand them.<\/p>\n\n With Solidres:<\/strong> coupons and extras are part of every Solidres edition, including the free one, so you can give returning guests a code and add breakfast, parking or a late check-out to the booking itself. The Discount plugin, included in every paid subscription, adds more types of discount on top.<\/p>\n\n A direct channel does not create demand. It captures the demand that already knows your name, which is why the OTAs stay in the picture for discovery, and why your channel and theirs have to share one inventory. It also asks for some upkeep that a commission line never shows:<\/p>\n\n With Solidres:<\/strong> Solidres is a one-time purchase with optional renewal, not a monthly fee, and it takes no commission on any booking. Your site keeps working if you do not renew; renewing is what brings updates and support. The Channel Manager, if you add it, is a yearly subscription priced by the rooms you sync, again with no commission.<\/p>\n\n You can do all of this within a month, and most of it in an afternoon.<\/p>\n\n This is the shape Solidres is built around: a booking engine on your own website, with the reservations in your own database and no commission on any booking, and the Solidres Channel Manager to keep the OTAs selling the same rooms without handing them the keys. Start by comparing the Solidres editions, including the free one<\/a>, and when you are ready to connect your channels, read what the Solidres Channel Manager does and what it needs<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you run a small property, the chances are that most of your bookings arrive through online travel agencies, the OTAs. It works. The platforms bring guests you could never have reached on your own, the bookings keep coming, and you pay a commission on nearly every night you sell. That arrangement has a name […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.solidres.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1292"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.solidres.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.solidres.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.solidres.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.solidres.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1292"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.solidres.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1294,"href":"https:\/\/www.solidres.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1292\/revisions\/1294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.solidres.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.solidres.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.solidres.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The sum, with your own numbers<\/h4>\n\n
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Keep the OTAs, add a channel you own<\/h4>\n\n
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What a direct channel needs<\/h4>\n\n
What it takes to run one<\/h4>\n\n
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Where to start<\/h4>\n\n
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