Get your Direct CoS and booking terms right, the rest will follow.

Definitions first. First-party data is real, and it is information a business collects directly from its own customers, through its own channels, with the customer's knowledge and consent. Data like email, phone number and address, collected at booking or check-in. No intermediary like an OTA or GDS sits between the business and the data.

View by Fergus Boyd, Independent Hospitality Consultant

A good website, good digital marketing, a decent loyalty offer, and a booking engine/IBE are essential for all hotels to keep a meaningful share of guest relationships in-house. The OTA's role should be to bring new guests to a hotel. They excel at this as their websites are tuned for discovery. Any hotel which fails to persuade an OTA-booked guest to book future stays with them has only itself to blame. FoH staff should be all over the OTA-booked guest to gain their real email and replace the obfuscated OTA email with this. The Cost of Sale of a direct booking should be circa 7%, fully loaded costs, ie including IBE, CRM, PPC/SEO/”GEO”, in-house staff, outsourced agency staff. If the figure is 10% plus, then the hotel is failing and deserves to lose its base to OTAs.

The differentiator is those hotels that treat data as an asset to be used, versus hotels that just treat it as a shiny toy to collect. 10-year-old direct guest data in a failing CRM may be worse than useless.

The main direct killer seems to be the booking cancellation terms. They have to be as flexible as the OTA. Offer free cancellation the day before for some rates. Also, you must be able to take the guest's credit card, pre-auth it, tokenise it, and charge it if they are a no-show. The OTAs do this well. Play their game, but better.

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