Direct bookings
Direct booking share: how independent accommodation owners can measure it consistently
WebRešenje PR / DirectBalkan ·
Short answer
Direct booking share is the part of your business that came to you without an intermediary taking a per-booking commission, divided by all your business, over the same period. It only becomes useful when it is measured the same way every time:
- write down once what you count as direct;
- measure it by revenue and by guest nights, not only by number of bookings;
- count completed stays in a fixed period, using the same rule on every channel.
There's no universal good or bad share. The value of the number is in comparing your property with itself: month against month, season against season.
Why the definition matters more than the percentage
Two owners can each report their "direct share" and mean very different things. One counts enquiries, the other completed stays; one counts guests who found the property on an OTA and then phoned, the other doesn't; one measures bookings, the other revenue. Neither number is wrong, but they can't be compared with each other, and an owner who changes definitions between seasons can't compare their own figures either.
The fix is to keep two separate facts about every reservation:
- the booking channel: where the reservation was actually made and who, if anyone, charges for it (an online travel agency (OTA), your own booking engine, phone or email, a marketplace);
- the discovery source: how the guest first found you, where you know it (a previous stay, a recommendation, a search engine, an OTA listing).
Direct booking share is about the booking channel. The discovery source answers a different question (what brings guests to you) and is worth recording separately rather than mixing into the share.
What counts as direct
A workable definition: a booking is direct when the contract is between the guest and the property and no intermediary takes a commission on that booking. Applied to common cases:
| Booking made through | Booking channel | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Your own website with a booking engine | Direct | Software or payment fees are direct-channel costs, not commission |
| Phone, email or messaging to you | Direct | Record these manually if no system captures them |
| Walk-in guest | Direct | Record manually, like phone bookings |
| A free booking link in Google that opens your own site | Direct | The booking is made on your site; Google is the discovery source. OTAs also appear in Google's free booking links: a booking through an OTA's link is an OTA booking |
| An OTA such as Booking.com or Airbnb | OTA | Even if the guest stayed before |
| A marketplace or agent paid a commission per booking | Intermediary | Treat like an OTA in the share |
| A platform paid by fixed subscription where the guest books with you | Your choice: decide once | Record it as its own channel so you can see it either way |
The last row is a genuine judgment call. A subscription platform where the guest books directly with the property behaves like a direct channel in cost, because no commission is taken per booking, but it is still a platform. Keeping it as a separate line lets you report the share both with and without it.
Bookings, nights or revenue?
| Measure | Formula | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Booking share | direct bookings ÷ all bookings | How many reservations come direct; easy to count, but a one-night stay weighs as much as a two-week one |
| Night share | direct guest nights ÷ all guest nights | How much of your occupancy comes direct |
| Revenue share | direct revenue ÷ all revenue | How much of your income depends on channels you control; usually the most useful headline |
Measure revenue the same way on every channel: your price for the stay (the nightly price plus the fees you charge) before any commission or host fee is deducted, and without any fee the platform charges the guest. Include or exclude taxes such as tourist tax, but make the same choice everywhere. If you compare revenue after commission instead, you are mixing the share with channel cost, which is a separate calculation (see Booking.com commission vs direct bookings).
Counting rules that keep the number honest
- Completed stays. Count stays that took place, or decide once how you treat cancellations and no-shows, and apply that rule to every channel.
- One date rule. Assign each stay to a period by its arrival date (or by its departure date), not sometimes by booking date and sometimes by stay date. For seasonality analysis, stay date is usually the one you want.
- One reservation, one count. A modified booking is still one booking. A guest who cancels on an OTA and rebooks directly is a cancellation on one channel and a booking on the other: count it consistently.
- No owner blocks. Dates you blocked for yourself, maintenance or friends are not bookings.
- Same period for both sides. The numerator and the denominator must cover exactly the same dates.
Where the data comes from
Most of the figures already exist in systems you use; the work is in combining them in one place:
- OTA extranets and host dashboards. Booking.com lets partners download monthly reservation statements as a spreadsheet; they are organised by check-out date, so re-sort them if you assign stays by arrival date. Airbnb lets hosts export an earnings report for a chosen date range.
- Your booking engine or property management system (PMS). Most record a source or channel for each reservation. Check how reservations you enter by hand are labelled by default, so that phone bookings, website bookings and OTA bookings don't end up mixed together.
- Google. Google's reports for booking links show impressions and clicks, not bookings. The bookings themselves have to be counted in your own booking engine.
- A simple manual log for phone, email, messaging and walk-in bookings, if no system captures them.
One spreadsheet with a row per stay and columns for arrival date, nights, revenue, booking channel and discovery source is enough for most independent properties.
A simple worksheet
| Channel | Completed stays | Guest nights | Revenue | Share of revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Own website | (your records) | (your records) | (your records) | revenue ÷ total revenue |
| Phone, email, walk-in | (your records) | (your records) | (your records) | revenue ÷ total revenue |
| OTA 1 | (your records) | (your records) | (your records) | revenue ÷ total revenue |
| OTA 2 | (your records) | (your records) | (your records) | revenue ÷ total revenue |
| Other platforms | (your records) | (your records) | (your records) | revenue ÷ total revenue |
| Total | (sum) | (sum) | (sum) | 100% |
Fill it once per month and once per season. The direct share is the sum of the direct rows divided by the total.
Reading the result
- Watch the trend, not the level. A share that rises steadily from one season to the next says more than any single figure.
- Look by month. A property can be far more dependent on OTAs in some months than in others, and an annual average hides that. How demand patterns shift through the year is covered in Seasonality and channel mix.
- Don't optimise the share for its own sake. A higher direct share is only better if the direct bookings cost less to win than they return. Whether they do is a cost question, answered in Effective cost of distribution.
- Use it as a dependency signal. A low share combined with one dominant channel is the concentration risk described in How to reduce OTA dependency.
Summary: Define direct once (no per-booking commission, contract with the property), record booking channel and discovery source separately, and measure revenue and night share over completed stays with one date rule. Compare the property with itself over time.
