HI·03 · Position paper
Six reasons to rely less on the big platforms, written down once so you can borrow them for your next committee meeting, forum thread or pub conversation. No rage, I promise. Just the parts of the arrangement that never make it into the welcome email.
01
Fifteen percent of every booking, forever, is a strange price for an introduction. A host turning over £40,000 a year hands an OTA £6,000 of it, and not once, but every year, for the same service they were sold back in year one. No other supplier in your business works this way. Your cleaner has introduced guests to you as well, and she doesn’t take a slice of everything they spend for the rest of time.
02
You cook the breakfast, you fix the boiler at midnight, you earn the five-star review. The platform keeps the email address. So when that guest fancies coming back next summer, they search the app, and you pay the commission all over again. You’re renting your own customers back, one stay at a time. Most of us never notice, and to be fair to the platforms, it’s built so that you don’t.
03
Rate parity clauses decide what you can charge on your own website. Ranking algorithms decide what happens when you decline a booking or take too long to reply. Payout timing, cancellation terms, the appeal process when a guest is dishonest: every one of those rules is written by the company taking the commission, and they change without your signature whenever it suits them. Read your partner terms on a rainy afternoon sometime. It’s an education.
04
Set the ideology aside for a moment, because this part is just business. Any company earning 95% of its revenue through one channel is one policy change, one algorithm update or one suspended listing away from serious trouble, and it happens to careful, well-reviewed hosts every week. The forums are full of them. Spreading your bookings around is plain risk management, the same kind you’d apply to anything else that matters this much to you.
05
The OTAs are genuinely good at one thing: introducing you to a guest for the first time. Keep using them for that, honestly. The mistake is letting them own the second visit and the third. Commission ought to be a cost you pay once per guest, not a tax on every booking forever. Even nudging your mix from 95/5 to 60/40 changes your margins noticeably, and you never have to delist a thing.
06
You don’t need a marketplace, a growth team or a £20,000 website. You need three things: somewhere a guest can book you directly, a reason for them to use it, and a way of staying in touch with past guests that’s both legal and welcome. You’re holding up to 15% of margin to fund the “reason” part, so you can afford to be generous. All three are solved problems, and the how-to guides walk through each one.