OTA commission
15 to 20%
Off the top of every intermediated room night, across the network.
Prepared for 1834 Hotels
Prepared for 1834 Hotels
What we found inside 1834 Hotels' demand engine.
You run the operations, the revenue and the marketing for a growing portfolio. The category data says the biggest lever sitting under that portfolio is where the booking gets made, not whether it gets made.
With Rodney Harrex stepping in from SATC and the Auckland and Mantra Adelaide Central additions landing, you are scaling the network at exactly the moment the direct-versus-OTA maths matters most.
$126Mspent by OTAs and booking platforms
in the category last year
in the category last year
The thing that caught our eye
The platforms selling your rooms outspend the hotels selling their own by roughly five to one.
In the category dataset, OTAs and booking platforms poured $126M into advertising, while the entire Hotels and Resorts bucket spent just $25M (Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025). That gap is not a coincidence. It is Booking.com, WebJet and TripADeal buying the demand for your properties, then renting it back to you at 15 to 20 points of commission.
For a white-label manager running a network, that is not one hotel's problem. It is the same margin leak repeated across every property under the 1834 banner.
We've solved thisAcross our travel accounts we have driven north of 12x ROAS on direct-booking campaigns, money that would otherwise be an OTA commission.
Where the category money sits
Hotels are the smallest voice in their own market.
Airlines, tour operators, tourism boards and OTAs all outspend the people who actually own the rooms. The category is loud everywhere except the place with the highest margin at stake.
Hotels and Resorts is the smallest slice of a $677M market. · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Who is buying your demand
The three names quietly bidding on your guests.
These are the platforms competing for the searcher who is already deciding to stay at one of your properties. Every one of these dollars is spent to sit between your hotel and the traveller.
Our read: this is intermediation spend, not destination-building spend. · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
If you can tell us the share of your network's room nights that currently come through OTAs, we can size the reclaim in one call.
Just hit replyA quirk in the channel data
The category is still spending most of its money in print.
Newspapers took $208M of travel and tourism spend, the single biggest channel, ahead of Digital and Social at $193M and Television at $146M. For a portfolio that lives or dies on bookings you can attribute, that mix is a gift. The demand your competitors buy in print, you can capture in the channels where the conversion is measurable and the cost per booking is knowable.
Legacy channels still dominate a category built for performance. · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
What you only learn from the inside
Things we know that aren't on any dashboard.
OTAs bid on your brand
Booking.com routinely buys ads against your own hotel names. If you are not defending those terms, you are paying commission to win a guest who already typed your property in.
The 7pm rate-check window
A large share of leisure bookings finalise after 7pm on the guest's phone, after they have compared rates on an OTA. Meta retargeting in that window converts the wavering direct booker.
Rate parity has a loophole
Parity clauses stop you undercutting on price, not on value. Free breakfast, late checkout or a room upgrade offered only on the direct channel moves the booking without breaching the OTA contract.
Portfolio pooling beats property silos
A single manager running many properties can pool first-party data and creative across the network, so a guest who leaves Cradle Mountain becomes a warm audience for Kangaroo Island. Independent hotels cannot do this. You can.
Google's peak is not January
The category's stay peak is January, but the search and spend peak runs earlier. The direct campaigns that win the summer are funded in spring, not when the rooms are already filling.
Length of stay is a bid signal
A three-night direct booking is worth far more than a one-night OTA booking, but most accounts bid the same on both. Weighting toward longer stays quietly lifts the return without lifting the budget.
Three things we'd look at first
Where we'd start, specifically.
01
Defend every property's brand terms
Lock down the branded search on all managed hotels so the OTA cannot intercept a guest who is already looking for you. This is the cheapest booking you will ever buy and often the first one an OTA steals.
Track recordBranded and direct campaigns in our travel accounts run at costs per purchase under $20.
02
Build one network-wide audience layer
Pool booking and enquiry data across the whole portfolio into a single first-party audience, then run cross-property prospecting so the network markets as one brand with many destinations, not many brands shouting alone.
Track recordPooled audiences let us hold single-digit CPMs on Meta while scaling reach.
03
Fund the spring, not the summer
Shift the media weight ahead of the January stay peak so you are capturing intent while it is cheap, rather than bidding against every OTA once the season is already hot.
Track recordTiming discipline has pushed direct-booking ROAS north of 12x across our travel clients.
One honest comparison
What we deliver against the channel you are renting.
The point is not our numbers in isolation. It is that a direct booking at these efficiencies keeps a margin an OTA takes as commission. These are our own delivered results across travel and tourism accounts, kept deliberately loose, not a category promise.
Our direct ROAS
north of 12x
Sunny first-party benchmark, as at Jun 2026.
Cost per direct booking
under $20
On strong accounts. Sunny first-party benchmark, as at Jun 2026.
This is a snapshot, not the plan
A real plan is built on better data than a quick scan.
Everything above we read from the outside. Plugged into your booking data, PMS and channel manager, the direct-versus-OTA picture goes from directional to exact.
Nielsen Ad IntelCategory & competitor ad-spend tracking
Roy MorganAudience & consumer profiling
Google Premier PartnerTop tier of Google agencies
Meta Business PartnerVerified platform access
This briefing is what we can see from the outside. Imagine what we'd build with the data on the inside.
Proof, not promises
Check out our success stories.
We've done this for travel & tourism brands right across Australia. See the campaigns, and the results, for yourself.
Check out our success storiesWhat this is actually worth
Here's the size of the prize.
$1.5M
reclaimable margin per $10M of OTA-booked room revenue
The working is simple and yours to check. For every $10M of room revenue currently booked through OTAs at roughly 15% commission, about $1.5M leaves the network each year. Move even a third of those nights to direct and you keep half a million dollars, at direct-campaign efficiencies that cost a fraction of the commission.
Directional only. It scales with your actual OTA mix and network revenue, both of which we would confirm from your booking data on the call. Real numbers, once we see your OTA share.
We take on a limited number of travel accounts each quarter
The next 30 minutes
Let's size your direct-booking reclaim.
Bring your OTA mix and we will map, live, what a network-wide direct engine is worth across the portfolio. No pitch deck.
Just hit reply30 minutes, one strategist, straight answers.
This isn't a sales call in disguise. If the reclaim is not big enough to matter, we will tell you and hand back the working so your team can use it.
- ✓
Your true OTA leak
We size the commission leaving the network and the share that is realistically winnable direct.
- ✓
The branded-term audit
A quick check of which of your properties an OTA is currently intercepting on search.
- ✓
The spring calendar
How we would phase spend ahead of the January peak across the portfolio.