A lake full of fish: how to take direct bookings from zero to 60%

There’s a moment early in Gorjan Lazarov's tenure as CEO of Orea Hotels and Resorts that says a lot about where the hospitality industry has been – and where it still needs to go. 

When Gorjan joined Orea in 2016, the group's own website was generating virtually zero revenue. Guests were there, demand was there and a brand was there. But the channel that would have converted that demand at full margin, without any commission sitting in between, had never been built into a strategy. 

"You have been walking around a lake," he told his team. "It's full of fish, but you never cared to actually catch them." 

Today, the group’s own website generates around 60% of total revenue. This is the story of how they turned it around. 

Direct booking isn't a tactic – it's a brand decision

When thinking about direct bookings, the temptation is to reach for the tactical levers first: rate parity, metasearch, loyalty programs, booking engine UX. Those things matter. But a more fundamental question is whether your organization has decided that the direct relationship with the guest is worth building. 

For Orea, that decision had wide-ranging consequences. It shaped how they thought about brand investment, about guest data and about the long-term cost of depending on third-party channels. It meant making arguments to ownership for patience in the early years, when the top line was still being rebuilt. "We were lucky enough to have owners that were looking into the long term," Gorjan says. 

It also meant investing in the things that make guests want to come back directly: better coffee at breakfast (including a barista); paper bags at the buffet to take something to go; a culture at the front desk built around ownership rather than deflection.  

None of these are loyalty program mechanics. They are brand-building moments that, compounded over time, produce guests that become advocates. As Gorjan says: "When the customer speaks about you and recommends you, you have built a brand." 

Brand awareness and direct revenue are connected. Orea now has the highest brand awareness in the Czech Republic among domestic hotel groups – higher than international chains operating in the same market. Two thirds of the group's guests now come from the Czech Republic, compared to one third at Covid-era lows. That domestic loyalty is the platform the direct channel is built on. 

The hidden data problem 

Hospitality's data challenge isn't really about access. Most hotels have data. What they lack is information. 

Transaction records, stay histories, booking windows and source data are available to almost any property running on a modern property management system. But turning that into something a front-desk colleague can actually use – a guest profile that tells you they've stayed three times, that they complained about noise on their last visit, that they prefer a high floor – requires something more deliberate. 

This is exactly where Orea has been investing. The group built a model that predicts guest arrivals with 90% accuracy on hourly slots, which allows for smarter shift planning and a front-of-house team that can flex across breakfast, checkout and reception as the day's demand moves through the hotel. The commercial logic is that a well-staffed, low-friction arrival experience is one of the things that converts a first-time guest into a repeat one – and a repeat guest is a direct booking in waiting. 

The longer-term vision is more ambitious. Gorjan describes wanting something closer to the Amazon recommendation model: a guest-facing platform that understands preferences well enough to make upsell feel like service rather than selling.  

His group's own app, MyOrea, is the current vehicle for that – handling bookings, guest profiles and ancillary purchases. It's still in its early stages, but the direction is clear: the direct relationship becomes more valuable the more personalized it gets. 

For hoteliers building a direct channel strategy, this highlights something easy to miss. The booking engine comes first, inevitably. But the data infrastructure that makes direct bookings more valuable over time – the guest recognition, the preference capture, the ability to serve a relevant offer at the right moment – is what turns a channel into a relationship. That work starts before the guest arrives and continues long after they check out. 

Technology as a trust signal, not a cost center 

It would be easy to read Orea's technology investments – the robots, the mobile keys, the predictive staffing model, the contactless check-in and checkout flows – as a series of innovation bets made by a CEO who happens to like technology. 

But the technology decisions at Orea aren't primarily innovation bets. They are hospitality decisions made through a technology lens. 

Room service via robot in a four-star resort isn't there because robots are interesting. It's there because the standard in a four-star hotel is no room service at all – and Orea decided that standard was wrong. The robot makes the unit economics work. The guest gets something they couldn't get anywhere else at that price point. Kids love it. Parents remember it. They come back. 

Mobile keys and online check-out are driven by the same logic. The friction of queuing at reception or standing at a desk to collect a key card isn't just operationally inefficient. It's a moment where the guest's experience of your brand is determined by a process rather than a person. Removing this friction frees both the guest and the front-desk team to have a different kind of interaction – the kind that builds the direct relationship that makes the next booking more likely to come through your own channel. 

This is the connection that's easiest to miss in direct booking strategies: the guest experience and the commercial outcome are not separate workstreams. Every moment that builds trust with a guest is a moment that makes the next booking more likely to bypass an OTA. 

What this looks like in practice for your property 

Orea's story isn't directly replicable. They have scale, ownership alignment, a decade of cultural investment and a domestic market where leisure travel is deeply concentrated. Most hoteliers operate with tighter margins, leaner teams and less room for long-term thinking. 

But the underlying logic holds regardless of size. 

Your direct channel doesn't grow because you build a booking engine. It grows because guests trust your brand enough to seek it out. That trust is built through the quality of the experience and the consistency of the team. It’s the feeling at every touchpoint, digital and human, that the hotel knows them and is on their side. 

The tactical work of direct booking – rate strategy, search visibility, retention emails, loyalty mechanics – is real and necessary. But it runs on a foundation that technology alone can't provide. 

Gorjan Lazarov walked around that lake for long enough to know what was in it. Then he taught his team to fish. 

To hear more about Orea’s transformation, enjoy the full episode with Gorjan Lazarov on Matt Talks Hospitality. 

Watch the episode