OTA commission
15-18%
on every room night they book for you, forever
Prepared for Prendiville Group
Prepared for Prendiville Group
What we found inside Prendiville's booking engine.
A family group since 1978, running close to two dozen hotels and restaurants from Cottesloe to Broome, Rottnest to Darwin. That footprint is a genuine advantage. The way the category spends around you is where the money leaks.
Molly, this is a quick outside read of where your demand is bought, and by whom, before anyone books a room.
$126Mspent by OTAs and booking
platforms last year
platforms last year
The thing that caught our eye
The middleman outspends every hotel in the country, five to one.
As at December 2025, OTA and booking platforms (Booking.com, WebJet, TripADeal) poured $126M into the category. The entire Hotels and Resorts segment spent $25M. So the intermediary buys the intent, sends the guest to your property, then charges commission on a booking your rooms fulfilled.
For a group your size, that commission is not a line item. It is a second marketing budget you are paying without controlling it.
We've solved thisAcross our travel accounts we've driven direct-booking ROAS north of 12x.
Where the category money goes
Hotels are the quietest spenders in a loud room.
The $677M in this category is concentrated in airlines, tour operators and the platforms that resell rooms. Owned hotel demand is the smallest slice, which means direct-booking share is contested by everyone except the hotels themselves.
Hotels and Resorts is the smallest category segment while OTAs sit near the top · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
The read on your portfolio
You are running two businesses under one brand handle.
Rottnest, Cottesloe, Samphire and Broome sell desire. The buyer is dreaming of a beach and can be moved with imagery, story and timing. Karratha, Port Hedland, Kalgoorlie and Mt Isa sell proximity. The buyer is a crew rotation, a corporate account or a contractor who needs a bed near a job, and books on availability and rate, not romance.
These two demand engines want opposite media. Our read: the leisure venues are being sold like the regional ones, or the regional ones like the leisure ones, and one of the two is quietly leaking margin. The Ibis Styles properties in Geraldton, Karratha and Mt Isa sit inside a franchise system that already runs its own demand, which makes the split even sharper to manage.
If you can send us your direct-versus-OTA booking split by property, we'll show you which of the two engines is leaking, with numbers.
Let's talkThe calendar you already beat
Your geography is a natural hedge most hotels would pay for.
The category peaks in January and bottoms out in December. A single-location hotel lives and dies by that curve. You do not. Broome, Karratha and Port Hedland fill through the dry season while Perth escapes the cold; Rottnest and Cottesloe peak over summer. The prize is not the peaks, it is buying the shoulder weeks cheaply while everyone else is dark.
Category demand peaks January, troughs December · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Who's really bidding on your rooms
The competitors for a Prendiville booking aren't other hotels.
When someone searches one of your property names, the platforms below are often bidding on it too, then reselling the room back to you on commission. This is the head-to-head that decides your direct share.
The platforms reselling your rooms outspend most owned hotel budgets · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
What you only learn from the inside
Things we know that aren't on any dashboard.
The billboard tax
OTAs bid on your own hotel names and win, because they never rate-cap. Defensive brand search wins those clicks back for cents on the dollar, and stops paying commission on a guest who already typed your name.
Dry season books early
Broome and the Kimberley fill three to four months ahead, not three weeks. Leisure media for the north-west has to run in the Perth winter, when the images sell hardest and the rate holds firm.
FIFO doesn't dream
Karratha and Port Hedland demand moves with project rosters and rate, not with sunsets. Corporate rate agreements and availability feeds do more than any hero video ever will for those properties.
The restaurant is the funnel
Tigerfish, Rays and Lontara pull an audience that never searched for a hotel. A diner who loved the room is your cheapest future guest, if the booking data from the table connects to the booking data from the front desk.
Metasearch beats the OTA
Google Hotel Ads and metasearch let you place your direct rate beside the OTA's, at the exact moment of comparison. Most groups leave that slot empty and hand the click to Booking.com for free.
Rottnest is a captive market
Once the ferry is booked, the accommodation search is short and local. Owning that narrow window with Samphire and Hotel Rottnest is worth more than broad awareness that competes with the whole state.
One honest comparison
The direct guest costs less and stays yours.
The OTA guest is rented. You pay commission, you don't own the email, and you re-buy them next year. The direct guest is bought once and kept. Here is the shape of it.
Our cost per direct booking
under $20
Sunny first-party benchmark, as at Jun 2026
The difference
Yours to keep
the direct guest's data feeds the next campaign, the OTA's doesn't
This is a snapshot, not the plan
A real plan is built on better data than a quick scan.
Give us the direct-versus-OTA split and the occupancy curve by property, and this outside read becomes a costed roadmap.
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.
$1M+
Commission sitting in your OTA mix
The lever is booking channel. Assume a meaningful share of room nights across your two dozen properties currently flows through OTAs at roughly 15% commission. Shifting even a slice of that to direct, through defensive brand search, metasearch and first-party remarketing, keeps commission you are handing over today. On a portfolio your size, that is north of a million dollars a year in recovered margin. It is the first number we would chase.
We'll tighten this against your actual channel split and ADR. The figure moves; the opportunity doesn't.
One WA hospitality group per quarter
The next step
Let's find the leak, then close it.
A short reply gets you the property-level version of this read, with your own channel numbers in it.
Just hit replyor just reply to the email this came in, I read every one.
This isn't a pitch in disguise. If direct bookings are already your strength, we'll tell you and point at the next thing worth fixing.
- ✓
Your OTA leakage, quantified
We map commission by property and show where direct wins fastest.
- ✓
The two-engine split, separated
Leisure and regional get their own media logic instead of one shared plan.
- ✓
The shoulder-week calendar
Where to buy cheap demand while the category sits dark in December.