Like money? Great! It’s time to make more of it.

Making more money is easier than you think, thanks to a few fixes to common mistakes.

For today’s lesson, it’s time to take a look at your own booking numbers. By taking a moment to calculate (and appreciate) the scope of your current situation, you’ll notice just how much money can be gained by making some small adjustments.

Later on, we’ll explain the steps to take, to improve your numbers. You might decide to complete these improvements one by one, or you could just get a new site and have all these items addressed all at once, with style.

Regardless, let’s take a look at just how much you’re spending, without even noticing.

First, consider your unnoticed loss: $10,200 each month, for example.

In many cases, hoteliers don’t even realize how much money they are losing. Let’s take a look at the numbers.

As reference, we’ll use a particular château hotel we work with in the Bergerac region of France.

Activity: calculate the value of an improvement to your direct bookings.

Here are the metrics of our partner boutique hotel in France.

• 20 OTA bookings x $200/night = $4000
• $4000 x 17?% OTA commission = $680 lost per night
• $680 lost per night x 30 days = $20,400 lost per month

If just a couple of those OTA bookings each day were instead a direct booking, you’d save $2040 each month.

If just 10 of those 20 bookings were direct bookings, it would mean saving $10,200 each month.

Now, your turn!

Take a moment to fill in the blanks in your own hidden expenses.

• X OTA bookings x $X/night = $Y
• $Y x 17% OTA commission = $Z lost per night
• $Z lost per night x 30 days = $??,000 lost per month

Pretty painful expense, eh? Time to do something about it.

That’s a modest example, and you can do similar calculations for your own property as well. All to often, hoteliers don’t take the time to see how much they are wasting in commissions to OTAs. You know the ones: Booking.com, Agoda… name your poison.

Once you realize the amount you’re paying in commission for those referred guests, it may hurt. Worse yet, many hoteliers believe that they have no option.

But you do have an option! In upcoming posts, we’ll start by looking at the basics your visibility online, your site’s ease of use, and the booking process on your site.

Prefer an easy shortcut?

We’ve seen just about everything in our 15+ years helping websites and marketing professionally. Today, we help boutique hotels and resorts all over the world: North America, Europe, and Asia, especially. A major focus is on boosting direct bookings, with the websites that we create — which take all these key points into account.

Set up a free consultation and we’ll help you get a clear picture of your current expenses — and the solutions.