Why your hotel’s direct booking rate is still stuck below 15%

You can order take out, a taxi, or a week's worth of groceries with one tap. So why does booking a hotel room still feel like filling in a tax return? 

That's the question that pulled Frédéric Robles out of a decade in corporate law to build Namastay, a booking engine built around one idea: make paying for a hotel as easy as paying for anything else. Namastay is now live in more than 400 hotels across 42 countries, plugged into systems including Mews. 

Frédéric joined Matt Welle on the latest Matt Talks Hospitality to discuss why most hotels sit between 5-15% of direct booking share.  

Airlines solved this problem a generation ago, with many carriers seeing a direct booking share of up to 90%. So why does hospitality still need convincing that the website is a serious sales channel, not a nice-to-have option alongside OTAs? 

The power of digital wallets 

A hotel guest hands over their card details at booking. Then again at check-in. And then sometimes again at check-out. Compare that with retail, where Apple Pay and Google Pay have made checkout a formality rather than an event. Namastay's entire premise is that the gap between those two experiences is where direct bookings go to die. 

The data backs it up. Frédéric told Matt that hotels using digital wallets for checkout have seen mobile bookings more than double, with wallet payments making up as much as half of all mobile transactions on some properties. Guests who start a payment with Apple Pay are also more likely to complete it than guests who start typing in a 16-digit card number – and wallet users tend to spend more per booking. 

None of this is really about mobile UX – it's about trust. A guest who feels safe finishing a purchase finishes it. Someone who has to hunt for a card, retype an email address and wonder if the site redirect is legitimate, doesn't. 

The redirect nobody talks about 

Most booking engines still bounce the guest off the hotel's site onto a separate booking domain the moment they click "book now". Namastay keeps the whole flow inside an iframe on the hotel's own site. That means no redirect, no new URL and one set of cookies. 

This small technical decision has a big result. Google reads a fast bounce to another domain as a sign the visitor wasn't interested. Keep the guest on-site through checkout and the search engine optimization benefit compounds alongside the conversion benefit. A cleaner checkout does two jobs at once. 

Where Mews fits 

Frédéric and his team built the first third-party booking engine integration with Mews Payments, including Apple Pay support. A guest's card goes through 3D Secure once at booking and can be reused securely for every later charge, meaning front desk teams no longer make repeated requests for payment. For anyone who has watched a check-in queue back up while a receptionist reprints a payment slip, that's real impact. 

Where else can hoteliers make gains? Buy now, pay later options have lifted upsell revenue on some properties. Multi-room and even multi-property booking flows for groups with sister hotels nearby can increase uptake. Next on the roadmap is folding restaurant and spa reservations into the same checkout, so a guest booking a room doesn't need a second phone call to secure a table. 

The takeaway for revenue managers and GMs 

Focus the fundamentals of direct bookings. A strong website, sensible rate strategy and real investment in visibility through metasearch still do most of the heavy lifting. But if your team has done all of that and direct bookings still won't move past the mid-teens, it’s likely time to re-examine the payment options you offer your guests. 

Watch the full conversation on Matt Talks Hospitality for plenty more insights, including why so many hotels are still taking card numbers over the phone in 2026, and what that's actually costing them. 

Watch the episode